The Seal Read online

  ‘Let me raise the portal,’ Roshan said to Yesfir. Behrouz’s eyes softened. Before the djinni could protest, Roshan added, ‘I feel strong and rested.’

  That was an understatement. Whether it was Yesfir’s news or her healing magic, Roshan’s body buzzed with so much power, she thought she might float.

  Without protest, and to Roshan’s surprise, Yesfir accepted her offer. The djinni pulled out her tablet and shared Iram’s coordinates with her.

  The portal opened inside a passageway wide enough for all three to walk down shoulder to shoulder. Zana led the way, Navid close behind him. Set in alcoves along the walls, carnelian firestones filled the vaulted space with white light. Roshan experienced the passageway’s gentle decline in her calves and ankles.

  By the time she’d caught up with the manticore, his head held up and his scorpion’s tale a curlicue, Roshan had reached the passageway’s end.

  ‘Now, that’s what I call djinn magic,’ Navid said.

  An archway, hundreds of paces wide and with fluted pillars of a similar height, framed the scene below. Roshan leaned on a wall for balance. Above her, somehow, sunlight percolated through the desert sand and lit the scene below: a city bisected by a main road. Streets branched from both sides of it and passed buildings one and two storeys tall. Some buildings had domes and others had rooftop gardens. Most had a central courtyard. Two ziggurats on opposite sides of the main road towered above the city. Their height and size meant they cloaked adjacent buildings in shadow for an hour or two each day.

  Wary of the steep drop, Roshan shambled to the exposed edge for a closer look. Goats negotiated the shallow ledges of the chamber’s walls, and kites soared on thermals. On her right, walled lanes wove their way between buildings and, occasionally, ran parallel to the main road. When she sighted similar structures on the left side of the city and noticed how water filled them, she recognised canals. Moored boats and cranes lined a dockside. Behind the dock, figures and hand-drawn carts milled in and out of a broad, single-storied building, a marketplace erected on its flat roof. On the opposite side of the highway, its canal system dry, stood a similar dock and building. Both were deserted.

  ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Yesfir said.

  Roshan watched water cascade from the cavern’s farthermost wall.

  ‘It’s like another world.’

  Yesfir stood closer to the drop than Roshan found comfortable. The djinni pointed straight ahead of her. Roshan followed Yesfir’s finger and saw how the main road ended in front of a lone building. Sunlight reflected off its white walls and golden dome.

  ‘That’s the palace, and it’s where King Fiqitush will receive us.’

  5

  High Magus Sassan rode through the gates of Rai, the short golden staff of office clutched in his left hand. A magus of lower rank rode ahead, leading the way to the city’s temple.

  Like most of the Armanian satrapy’s towns and cities that followed the curve of the Aras River, Rai’s population comprising merchants, shipwrights and the engineers responsible for the maintenance of the surrounding farms’ irrigation systems. Also, among them—if the intelligence report was correct—were thirty-one daevas, most without a stated occupation. It was all the evidence Sassan needed.

  As with most of the fire temples devoted to the Divine Light, this one had a large paved square. The city’s inhabitants, woken at dawn by guardsmen, occupied the square and bowed when Sassan rode past. The daevas formed a line in front of the cube-shaped temple with its domed roof and its tower-like wind catcher.

  Sassan counted only eleven daevas. Eight were whited-haired men and women, their legs bowed and shoulders rounded by the burning touch of the iron shackles on their wrists. Only three daevas—the younger ones, middle-aged by human standards—bowed when Sassan gazed upon them.

  Sassan squeezed his staff and seethed at the combination of disrespect and inaccurate intelligence. Behind the facade of fawning bows, Sassan imagined Rai’s citizens laughing at him. Like the other cities they’d visited this past fortnight, the daevas they’d rounded up fell short of the figure given in the intelligence report. Their high pain threshold had made interrogating the remaining daevas a futile exercise, and, anyway, they’d all willingly volunteered two useless pieces of information: a djinni came to see us; the other daevas left for Baka.

  None of the daevas had heard of Baka until the djinni’s arrival. No one knew the city’s location. Sassan couldn’t find it on his wooden plaque of the empire’s twenty satrapies and their associated cities. He’d requested a search of the plaques held in the empire’s capital, Persepae. So far, he’d received no word from the high temple’s archivist on the city’s whereabouts.

  Sassan dismounted and waited for a guardsman to lead his horse away. Short and stick-thin no matter how much he ate, Sassan bent his head, pretending he had grit between the toes of his sandalled foot. He muttered an air incantation to deepen and amplify his voice, then turned to face the crowd.

  ‘Citizens of Rai,’ he said, ‘there are daevas among you who continue to practise djinn magic. To ask a daeva to perform such magic, to approach a daeva with a wish the Divine Light desires not to grant you, is blasphemous. When you do so, you ignore the Divine Light’s will.’

  Sassan studied the crowd. No one looked away.

  Do they think I’m a fool?

  Rage bunched his muscles. His grip tightened around the golden staff.

  Forget who you are and so will they.

  The high magus swung around to face the line of daevas. Sassan recognised the bunched brows and the not-so-subtle glances between the daevas. Behind him, he heard the crowd’s murmurs. His face flushed at the realisation he had just suffered a staring spell—five to ten heartbeats where he’d appear to stare vacantly.

  God is testing me, he told himself, and then cleared his throat.

  ‘Convert to the One Religion, embrace the Divine Light and you will be forgiven your sins,’ he said, his sonorous voice bouncing off the temple’s walls and back at him. ‘If you do not convert, you will be tried for practising the corrupt magic of the djinn, and tomorrow, at noon, you will be executed.’ He paused, allowing the daevas time to consider what he’d said.

  Divine Light, Sassan prayed, unlike those daevas before them, please make these choose more wisely.

  Sassan squared his shoulders and raised his chin, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears.

  ‘Those of you wishing to convert, step forward.’

  The three younger daevas advanced. Behind him, the crowd whispered.

  I have failed you again, Divine Light.

  ‘The hearings will begin within the hour,’ he said.

  They still had time to reconsider. Until the last moment, before they lay their necks on the chopping blocks, they could change their minds. He’d wait to tell them so tomorrow. Right now, he had no wish to sound desperate for the sake of a handful of shrivelled daevas.

  Sassan signalled the guardsman holding his horse’s reins. Back in the saddle, he waited for the crowd to part and then rode for the city’s doors and the encampment beyond.

  As he rode, Sassan found himself caught between praying for the souls of the eight daevas and questioning General Afacan about this latest breakdown in intelligence.

  The emperor said this wouldn’t be easy, he reminded himself.

  It had been Sassan’s idea to unite the empire’s satrapies through the practice of a single religion. Like his father before him, the emperor was a tolerant man, prepared to let those he’d conquered and assimilated continue to speak their own languages, keep their cultural traditions and pray to their own gods. Such tolerance had made controlling the twenty satrapies unwieldy. Clerical control provided by the magi would ease some of the day-to-day pressure Persepae and the emperor were under.

  Seven years since implementing his plan, just one thing stood in the way of its fruition: the daevas and their wish-granting in exchange for a little auric energy. The daevas reminded the empire’s
citizens of their former ways. If the Divine Light would not grant them their wish and a daeva could, what point was there in following His religion?

  Uniting the empire was the purpose the Divine Light had chosen him for. He filled the high magus with His presence whenever Sassan suffered a seizure.

  ‘The Divine Spark is in all of us,’ the magus had told Sassan’s mother after he’d suffered his first convulsion. ‘Inside each one of us is a small part of the Divine Light—a spark. The spark inside your son is too great for his body to contain, and sometimes it overwhelms him. It’s a blessing mistaken for a curse. When he is eight, send your son to the temple. The magic he will learn as a novice will help him control the seizures.’

  Sassan hadn’t fully controlled his flailing on the floor and blackouts until after his sixteenth birthday. Until then, the seizures set him apart from the other novices. Bullying, the frequent jokes about his diminutive size and his tutors’ concerns over his lack of confidence had left Sassan isolated and without friends. The isolation, however, galvanised him. He’d prove them all wrong. If no one wanted to be his friend, he’d have more time to study and to practise magic.

  Twenty-two years after his ordination, twenty-two years of endless—and sometimes tedious—graft, politicking, the odd blackmail or bribe, the lobbying and countless favours called in, the Magi Council elected Sassan High Magus.

  He’d proven everyone wrong, and still he felt an outsider.

  With only himself and the Divine Light to depend on, Sassan devised a plan to endear himself to the emperor, consolidate his power and ensure his name was known throughout the empire.

  And now the daevas, that dying race of djinn he wished would hurry up and die, threatened to undo everything.

  Sassan drew up outside the operations tent and dismounted.

  Wearing a black tunic and matching leggings, General Afacan sat on a bench at the tent’s lone table. Hunched over a tablet, he stood when he heard Sassan enter. He towered over the high magus but bowed low. Both men had passed their forty-fifth year, and Sassan hadn’t yet spotted a single grey hair on the general’s head.

  ‘Think, speak and act well, High Magus,’ the general said.

  ‘Think, speak and act well, General,’ Sassan replied. Almost in the same breath, he added, ‘I counted only eleven daevas. How old is the intelligence you received?’

  Afacan waited for Sassan to sit on the opposite bench.

  ‘Three days,’ he said, then sat down. ‘Thanks to their portals, the djinn always reach a city before we do.’

  Sassan placed his staff on the table and scratched his chin.

  ‘But that doesn’t explain how they know our itinerary, which city we’ll arrive in and when.’

  Afacan pushed the tablet he’d been reading across the table.

  ‘That arrived with the dispatches from Persepae. It’s five days old, but the information matches similar reports.’

  Sassan scanned the tablet before looking up.

  ‘There have been more thefts of military dispatches sent to Persepae,’ Sassan said. Like the temple, the military never threw away any of its communications. More and more archives were being built to accommodate the thousands of tablets arriving in Persepae each day. ‘Are you thinking someone stole the latest itinerary we sent to your headquarters?’

  The general’s eyes rolled down before he looked directly at Sassan.

  ‘I do. Most of the time, there isn’t any sign of a break-in and specific tablets go missing, some of them related to this campaign.’

  Sassan thumped the table with the side of his fist.

  ‘Then we change the itinerary and do not share it with Persepae. The djinn are making fools of us.’

  The general’s eyes rolled down again.

  Sassan knew Afacan didn’t view the execution of daevas as soldiering. On one occasion, the general had called him up on intelligence about a city in which the daevas weren’t known to be practising djinn magic. A professional who followed orders, the general had organised the executions of those unwilling to convert, anyway. From that day, Sassan joined Afacan and oversaw the beheadings. Like the general, he was committed to this undertaking, and while he didn’t wield the sword that severed each daeva’s head from their body, the least he could do was to be present when they died.

  Sassan leaned across the table.

  ‘What’s on your mind, General?’

  ‘You’re right; the djinn are several steps ahead of us, and changing the itinerary is a good idea. There is, however, the problem of supplies. One of those in Persepae to receive our itinerary is the quartermaster. We’re almost out of barley for the horses. We reach Derbicca the day after tomorrow. We’ll find supply wagons waiting for us there. I recommend we change our itinerary after Derbicca; otherwise, the men and horses won’t last a week.’

  Impatient to stop the djinn and daevas embarrassing him, Sassan rubbed his chin.

  ‘Agreed, General,’ he said. ‘Just remember that with droves of daevas disappearing off to this Baka no one’s ever heard of, it won’t be long before the emperor asks questions, and that won’t be good for you or for me.’

  6

  Fiqitush thanked Shephatiah for helping him carry the rug from his room to the audience chamber. He had never developed the ability some djinn had for reading minds, but Fiqitush sensed Shephatiah’s uneasiness over the king of the djinn lugging a rug from one wing of the palace to the other. The djinn they passed bowed respectfully—he and they knew the old days had passed and one’s auric energy had to be conserved for only essential magic.

  Shephatiah disappeared through the doorway into the audience chamber. The extra firestones in the alcoves—also from Fiqitush’s room—made the chamber brighter, cheerier. Their soft peach glow, however, revealed gaps where tiles had fallen from the surrounding mosaics.

  They unrolled the rug over the hole in the larger but threadbare rug, then arranged on it a platter containing the coin-sized cardamom-flavoured biscuits, a pot of mint tea, a jug of water and six glass goblets.

  Fiqitush surveyed the paltry refreshments. He was desperate for Roshan and Navid to stay and help. After having them kidnapped, and Navid forced to live as a rat, he’d need more than a plate of bite-sized biscuits to convince them.

  He heard Shephatiah whisper an incantation. A tear-shaped vase with a single reddish-pink desert rose appeared in the rug’s centre. Fiqitush couldn’t bring himself to scold Shephatiah. He patted the djinni on the shoulder and then dismissed him. Fiqitush stepped over to the dais beneath the domed ceiling and sat down on its second step. Above him hung a candelabra no one had lit in more than a century.

  Fiqitush stood when he heard the double doors squeak open. He swallowed a gasp when he saw the yellow flames circling Yesfir’s eyes.

  He embraced Behrouz first, his forehead butting the daeva’s chest. ‘My bravest warrior,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

  Behrouz stepped aside, allowing Yesfir to approach. He stared at her eyes, then hugged her. ‘Daughter,’ he said, blinking back tears.

  First your mother, Parisa, and now you. I can’t lose you, too, Yesfir.

  As if hearing his thoughts, Yesfir whispered, ‘She almost died. There was nothing else I could do but surrender some of my energy to save her.’

  She sounded as if she were apologising. He took both her hands in his.

  ‘Your mother was a great healer,’ he said, then swallowed. ‘She’d be proud of you.’

  Yesfir squeezed his hands before letting go.

  ‘Hello, Grandpa.’

  Fiqitush bent down and ruffled the fur between Zana’s ears.

  ‘How you’ve grown, young man,’ he said. ‘Did you keep your promise and look after your mother and father?’

  Zana replied with an earnest nod.

  Like Behrouz, his daughter and Zana stepped aside.

  Roshan’s wide-eyed gaze shifted from Fiqitush to Yesfir and then back to Fiqitush.

  ‘That’s right, Yesfir’s my
daughter,’ he said. He bowed low. ‘Welcome, Roshan. And—’ He tilted his head at her open satchel. A head appeared, whiskers twitching. ‘And welcome, Navid.’ Fiqitush gestured at the rug. ‘Come, sit. I’m sure you’ve lots of questions. I have a lot of explaining to do.’

  Yesfir sat next to him while Roshan and Behrouz sat opposite. Navid emerged from his sister’s satchel and sat in front of her. The rat glanced up at her, and Roshan reached across to get him a biscuit.

  What will his father do when he finds out I had his son turned into a rat and his daughter almost died? thought Fiqitush.

  Fiqitush observed how Roshan was the only one who hadn’t poured herself a drink or wasn’t eating.

  ‘I promise to answer all your questions,’ he said to Roshan, ‘but first, I want you to understand what befell the djinn and why it led to my asking Yesfir and Behrouz to abduct you.’

  Roshan nodded.

  She hadn’t said a single word. Fiqitush tried not to let it bother him.

  ‘God made the angels from light, humans from clay and the djinn from a smokeless flame,’ he began. ‘Over time, the djinn weaved magic so potent, the humans worshipped us. And so, God had an angel, a sabaoth, fashion a signet ring, its seal designed to absorb a djinni’s auric energy and control him. The angel then gave the ring to a human king, Solomon. King Solomon sought me out, robbed me of my energy and forced me to summon before him all this world’s djinn. He took from each of them three-quarters of their auric energy and, thanks to the seal, subjugated us for half a century.’

  Heaviness nestled atop Fiqitush’s shoulders. How different things might have been if his brother, Emad, had been around when Solomon first arrived. Together, they might have resisted the seal. Fiqitush shook away the thought and continued.

  ‘The riches we delivered to him, the magnificent architecture we raised in his name brought Solomon fame, fortune and many political marriages. His foreign wives had him raise statues to their gods, and so he fell out of God’s favour. I think that’s why, on his deathbed, he bid me kiss the seal. I don’t know if he did it to spite God or if he felt guilty for what he’d done. Whatever his reason, he returned enough auric energy for me to build Iram, the djinn’s hidden home.’