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Ruin’s tired eyes were soft and sorry, and she raised a hand out of her black robe by way of explanation. It was withered nearly to the bone, the skin as cracked and peeling as the desert, the nails blackened and split. Pieces of her skin were slowly stripping away, blowing back from her crooked fingers in the hot air. She folded her veils over the hand again and looked down in shame. The smoke recoiled and the Djinn drew it back into the hanging cage.
“We would share our food, if you give us reason to pity you, and our water, which is more precious than amber, but you mustn’t touch my lady. She is not well.” The cat looked wretched, her eyes black and round, her spotted fur twitching under the predations of sand mites.
The Djinn considered, her eyes narrowing. She rubbed her nose with one painted hand—for the palms of her hands were stippled in glowing patterns, swirling in and in on themselves, the incandescent ink tracing scarlet loops where the lines of her hands might have been, if she had any.
“I am Scald,” she said at last, “and across six seas and nine deserts, I was one of the three Queens of Kash, and I had a crown of embers.”
Rend pawed the soil. “Why are you caged, Scald?”
The Djinn was quiet, her clouds dark and thoughtful. “Across nine seas and six deserts, I laid siege to the city of Ajanabh…”
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE CAGE
OF IRON
IN THE CITY OF KASH, THERE ARE SIX PALACES, six Thrones, and six Crowns. Three Queens and three Kings there are, each in their house. I was the Ember-Queen, and my coal-buttressed hall stood at the end of a long boulevard which was lined with Ixora and the Palaces of my sisters, the Tinder-Queen and the Ash-Queen. So too my brothers’ fastholds, the Hearth-King, the Kindling-King, and the King of Flint and Steel. When I call them my brothers and sisters, of course I by no means wish to indicate that they are any relation to me—cut this thought from your heart. Monarchs are members of a wide and varied fraternity, and this is all my connection to them.
We are the inheritors of the Kingdom of Kashkash, who was the first of the Djinn. He spun all of the rest of us out of the smoke of his beard, and the black curls flowed over the face of the earth. In the sacred fire of his heart we were first conceived, the immaculate flame. His stare burned forests in their shade and caused even human women, icy of heart and eye though they are, to swoon before his majesty. As his wispy children cavorted around him on the plains of the world, he exhorted them to follow him, dancing before them, as he led them into glory and might.
He told us that we had no need to build cities as the rest scrambled to do, but that cities would build themselves around us, for what man did not need fire? Thus he stood at the center of Shadukiam in the days before it knew that name. The whole of the city swirled up around him, all those roses, all those diamonds! Djinn followed him wherever he bade, into that glittering city and out again, and still his name is holy among us, incandescent, radiant. He was beautiful. He was loved, for in his beard were wonders lesser Djinn could not dream of, lamps and jewels and scrolls of flame and cloud, which he would pluck from his body and distribute like bread. He danced on the minaret tips of our first real homes and cried poetry to the blood-riddled sunsets, cried ho! For the thousand-year holocaust of the Djinn! And far below the rabble screamed their adoration. Of how many Kings in those days did Kashkash grant the wishes? How many maidenheads did he burn clear through? We named this city for him, and even human virgins anoint their foreheads with ashes in mourning, all these centuries hence.
This is what we tell to the world, with horns of brass and carnelian. So I was told; so I believed while I grew, a child in the city of Kash, wishing for golden bells for my belt and sweet honey for my supper. Thus we have told the world for century upon century. In my own time, my smoke-hair snaked and spiraled so long and so far that I had to carry it at my hips in two baskets of woven silver, and the other children laughed at me, until their parents admonished them—for such a mark meant that I would be Queen, just as the great beard of Kashkash marked him as King. I was taken away from my little house, taking with me three sets of golden spoons and a very nice samovar, and was initiated into the strange world of royalty. I was ten years of age, but among my people this is a respectable middle age. We do not age, but we die out rather more quickly than other folk. We flash and spark and die. Those who are pressed by seals and trickery into lamps and suchlike live longer, nigh on forever, as a coal will live if not struck alight. And as a coal is not alive, so a Djinn confined is not. This is the choice we make: Once in the open air and burning, ah, we never last long. Thus at ten I was no child—but my crown was young as a weeping orphan without a breast.
The Ash-Queen and the Hearth-King, Kohinoor and Khaamil, escorted me into the Alcazar of Embers, each of them carrying one of my baskets. I thought they were terrifying and beautiful, with burning gems set into their black skin and burning gold rings in their noses. Kohinoor was tall and thin as a hermit, all black smoke without a single spark in her, while Khaamil was smaller and fatter, lovely folds of flaming skin undulating, cradling a huge topaz in his navel. He had but one golden eye, the flame in it dancing like a dervish. The other socket was empty and burned black.
In the center of a red tile floor lay a banked and glowing bowl of coals, the symbols of my office. The Queen sat me down on a purple cushion—I balanced gingerly on my smoke, so as not to burn the tassels. She spoke firmly and kindly as she was able, being a woman of no small position, and too busy to care for an upstart new Queen. They had both of them been fonder of the old Queen, who had simply gone up in flames at a family dinner the previous winter, to the mild surprise of all present.
“Now, young one,” said Kohinoor, firmly putting me in my place, for she was nearly fifteen, a daunting age, “it is not appropriate that you should reign and remain ignorant of our history. Thus it is our duty to tell you how things were in the old world, and how they came to be. However, we have a luncheon appointment with the Kindling-King, and he is serving blackened basilisk, which is our favorite, so kindly pay attention so that we are not forced to repeat ourselves…”
THE TALE OF
THE FIRST DJINN
NO DOUBT YOU VENERATE KASHKASH AS YOUR grandfather and best-loved household god. Stop. At this very moment.
It is necessary for the glorification of the Djinn, and also so that we may not be endlessly ensorcelled into various kitchen items for the purpose of granting the wishes of fishmongers’ daughters, that the name of Kashkash be adored and feared. Do not rub that lamp, darling, lest Kashkash leap out and swallow you whole! Do not clack your spoons together, sweetling! Kashkash will come billowing out of the handles and gobble you up! It is, however, not sensible to expect others to adore and fear what we do not, and so the secret history of the smoke-fiends is known only to a select few, of which you are now a member. It keeps the Djinn in terror of their monarchs, and the world in terror of the Djinn.
Shut your mouth, dear, it does not do to attract moths.
Kashkash was not the first Djinn—that poor, benighted soul has no name that any may recall, being the unwanted child of the fires that the Stars conflagrated when they walked through the first lands of the world. Every scorched thing spat out a Djinn like the pit in a cherry, and we had to find our way, even though we burned and burned and could not cool. We are nothing but charred, forgotten children whose birth was utterly unnoticed. I am a child of the Djinn who rose up from the scalded grasses. Khaamil is the child of the seared winds. The Queens kept their counsel and their records, though Kashkash wished all knowledge of our origin destroyed in the fire of his name. Now that you are one of us, we shall have to look into your pedigree. Kashkash was not the first, then, though many might now say he was. For it is not
only the common Djinn who pray in the name of Kashkash, but many preening priests and men of rank who know the truth in their boiling hearts, but take delight in telling the tale of a Djinn like Kashkash, who could have any woman, destroy any man.
Kashkash was indeed powerful, and fashioned his smoke into waving, fiery shapes to terrify us in our infancy, colored as no other Djinn had done, in blue and green and violet. To see him was extraordinary, they say, and we do not argue, at least in this. Around his head waved these airy flames, proud and strutting, proud and vain. So too is it true that he was present in the early days of the city which would come to be called Shadukiam. He dragged his flaming heel around the perimeter of that dung-spattered clearing that could hardly be called a shantytown in those days, when the long boulevard on which your Alcazar sits was nothing but a red dust-run. The place which Kashkash marked out in the mud was quickly dwarfed by the endless growing roads and markets of the Rose City. We built nothing, as he instructed us, but stole and wished our first settlement into life. Kashkash told us that no one of the Djinn could wish as he could, and thus wishing which he did not approve was outlawed. The great talent of the Djinn is in wishing, and of it we made a science after he passed from the world, though it has, in its turn, passed out of its keenest use since children have ceased trapping us in lamps and spoons. In those days we were young, we could not do it very well, but he could do little better: He wished for a palace of cedar and horn, and up rose the ramshackle towers of the Quarter. But oh! What he promised us! When he learned better, learned more! When he had made enough Kings his slaves, what he would build us then! How long he could stretch our lives—we would no longer be candles, briefly lit and briefly snuffed. We would be the flame of ten thousand generations!
He did learn, he did become a prodigy of wishes, but never to us were his talents bent. He loved better anything that was flesh and not smoke—the smallest of these things seemed to him more beautiful than we.
We are not meant to tell outsiders that Shadukiam is not in its entirety the right and province of the smoke-wights. Let the shade of Kashkash take us with his beard flying. We do not care.
The Quarter Kashkash dragged out for himself became a slum, a place where fire ran in the alleys and crimson teeth flashed in the shadows. Rickety towers were built high through the Rose Dome, until the black tips pierced the spaces between the pale pink petals, and so pressed were we in those turrets that our smoke squeezed through the very walls, our fire shot out from floor to floor, and while Kashkash ate grapes in the governor’s house and counseled him to save his coin when the scaffolders came clambering down from their work, the Djinn suffered and wept in their black hovels. He danced on the crumbling tips of the towers with his fires wreathing his eyes and sparking in the stinking wind and cried poetry to the blood-riddled sunsets, cried ho! For the thousand-year holocaust of the Djinn! And far below the tenements screamed their adoration through the squalor.
We lived in this way because Kashkash told us we must, and twirled his beard when he said so. He had the longest beard of any of us, after all. This is why monarchs are determined by such strange criteria. Each of the thrones demands its favorites: the hottest fire, the sweetest voice, and so on. Kashkash claimed his beard gave him sovereignty—should we choose differently? He brandished his beard and with it crushed an entire race into six thin towers. He told us then it was only the beginning, that we would rest soon on carnelian and brass and silk like blue fire, but day and night smeared their way across the Quarter and still we could not breathe for the smoke of another on our faces.
Finally, we could bear it no longer; the terrible smell and the unburied bodies and the decrepit buildings were close all around us. Some few remembered the open grass. What the clerics will not tell you is this: Kashkash was strangled in smoke on the steps of the tenements and his body burned. The towers were torn brick from brick and within a winter no charred stick of the Djinn Quarter could be scried out among the pretty new marble and hanging tapestries. We buried him at the crux of the crossroads of a new city, as far from Shadukiam and the memory of our shame there as it was possible to go. And we wished for nothing, but with our own hands built up a city of carnelian and brass, with couches of silk like blue fire, and paved out in beryl a long boulevard, along which we raised six Alcazars, one for each of the horrid towers that were.
