The Complete Parsina Saga

Volume I: SHRINE OF THE DESERT MAGE-6

Selima stared at the fabric, her expression a curious mixture of amazement and practicality. “It is very pretty,” she said cautiously.

“Stand up, let me try it on you.” Selima rose obediently and her father draped the cloth over the top of her head and down her back and shoulders.

“I thought you might use it for a head scarf of some kind.” Jafar stepped back to examine the effect more fully. In the dim light, with the whiteness of the fabric billowing around her, Selima looked even more like a ghostly reflection of his beloved Amineh.

Unaware of her father’s inspection, Selima was appraising the gift carefully. “It’s the wrong color for an abaaya, and it’s too long for a taraha, and the fabric really isn’t proper. It’s cut in a rectangle, which is awkward, and I can’t recut it without ruining the embroidery….”

She looked up to see her father’s face, crestfallen at her criticism of his present. Selima went over to him and hugged him yet again. “O Father, forgive a silly daughter. I didn’t mean to complain. The fabric is lovely, it truly is, and I’m not used to such richness. I only meant I’d have to study the cloth carefully if I want to use it properly. I didn’t want to ruin it by foolishly cutting it up or adapting it to some minor purpose. This gift is so beautiful it must be shown off in the best possible manner. I’ll have to give the matter great thought so I don’t waste the present you’ve brought me.”

Jafar laughed. Looking down into his daughter’s beautiful face he said, “Your mother taught you well how to humor an old man’s moods. The cloth cost me nothing but the effort to bend down and pick it up from the street. My only hope is that it gives you pleasure. If it does that, then I’m happy; if not, you can throw it back onto the street and we’re no worse off than we were before.”

“I will keep it, O my loving and generous father,” Selima insisted. “It is beautiful, it does please me, and I’ll find some use for it that does honor to you, the giver.” She took the cloth from her head, folded it with exaggerated reverence, and placed it atop the trunk that was their sole furnishing in the tiny room.

Turning back to her father, her face was bright with hope. “Oh Father, Abdoul the draper gave me ten fals this morning to watch his camels. We can eat again today!”

“Oromasd be praised,” Jafar said. “My stomach was complaining of its emptiness so loudly I could barely hear what you were saying. Have we any food left on hand?”

“None. I was waiting for you to come home so you could guard the stables while I went off to shop. Some rice and leeks, I think, and maybe enough left over for some fruit if we’re lucky.”

Jafar nodded glumly. He was becoming very tired of rice and leeks, but they could afford little else these days. “Don’t forget, go to the stall of One-Eyed Habib. The food’s of poor quality, but his prices are cheap and he won’t cheat you.”

Selima nodded as she once more donned her milfa. “My father’s wisdom guides me in all things,” she said—and then she was gone, her niaal flying across the bricks of the courtyard and out into the street beyond.

Jafar al-Sharif walked slowly from his room to the stable entrance, where he took up his familiar position on the stool by the doorway. The air here reeked of camels, horses, and asses, and all their dung, all their piss, all their sweat. Jafar thanked Oromasd he did not have to clean out the stalls. There were stablehands to do that; they were better paid than he was, but they earned it well. His task was merely to sit here and make sure no thieves absconded with the travelers’ beasts.

The stablehands were gone now, and Jafar was alone in the stable. “Poets,” he said again as he thought of the day’s humiliation. “No good can come of a city that ignores the meat and laps at the gravy. It’s decadence, that’s what it is. Mark my words, the Holy City of Ravan is on the decline if it casts out its storytellers. Nothing but doom and destruction can come from forgetting the past and bathing in the meaningless perfumes of idle rhymers.”

To his right, a camel snorted. Jafar al-Sharif looked over and nodded. “See, even the dumb beasts agree with me.” He turned his eyes heavenward. “O noble lord Oromasd, is it really too much to expect thee to give the people of thy Holy City as much good sense as thou gavest a camel?”

Chapter 3: The Wizard

The majestic peaks of the Tirghiz Mountains extended to the north and east of Ravan all the way to the edge of the Bitter Sea, that enormous inland lake which spawned the Harrud and Meshkal Rivers. To the north and east of that lay the wastes of the Gobrani Desert, so vast that few men had traveled its full extent. Past the Gobrani were the steppes of Birsk—and along the northernmost edge of those steppes the Himali Mountains jutted up from the earth as though to form a wall to keep men from falling off the rim of the world.

Few were the human eyes who’d seen the Himali Mountains firsthand, and even fewer were those who’d seen its wonders at close range. Steep escarpments and deep ravines, treacherous avalanches and ravenous monsters tended to discourage people from exploring the mountains’ secrets too closely. Most of the peaks retained their snow for ten or eleven months out of the year and all but the hardiest—or foolhardiest—people kept far away from that forbidding range.

At the very top of the highest mountain in the Himali chain at the edge of the world, on the mountain so high it had no name known to man or djinn, sat a mighty castle looking down on the world with lofty coldness. In point of fact, the castle did not sit on the mountain; the castle was part of the mountain itself, an integral segment of the peak’s natural majesty.

No human hand had worked to construct the castle. An army of Marids—those powerful spirits of the second rank of the djinni—working day and night for a year, a month, a week, and a day had carved the castle out of the naked rock. Then, at the bidding of the one who’d summoned and commanded them, they returned to the shadowy realm of their homeland.

Shahdur Castle, as it was known to those select few who even knew of its existence, stood as aloof as a glacier and as majestic as the mountain from which it was carved. No mortal army could conquer it, no human spies could breach its walls. It was a position of power from which its sole human occupant could conduct his affairs, insulated from the passions and the prejudices of the tiny world below.

The wizard Akar was the mightiest sorcerer of his age, perhaps the mightiest the world has ever known. Certainly the only man who could have challenged him was Ali Maimun, wizard to King Shahriyan, and he’d been dust for so many centuries that any attempts to compare the two men’s powers were doomed to failure. Akar himself made no comparisons; he knew he had no equals and refused to consider the situation further.

The master of Shahdur Castle lived his life quietly, secure in his niche of knowledge and power. He had few enemies because he touched few lives; those foes he did have could not reach him in his stronghold. Akar had no friends, for similar reasons, and counted himself lucky. Friends brought distraction, friends brought randomness into the order of one’s life. Akar judged himself an independent man and prided himself on his ability to live apart from all that was normal for lesser mortals.

The life of Akar the wizard was as cold and passionless as the rock of his castle’s walls. He would wake in the morning to breakfast served by one of the djinni who were his slaves. He would spend most of the day in one or the other of his many testing rooms, experimenting with spells, potions, and the nature of matter and energy. After supper he would retire to the vaulted chamber of his library, said to be the most extensive in all Parsina. There he would conduct his research as one of his magical servants read to him from among the myriad volumes.

Unlike Hakem Rafi the thief and Jafar al-Sharif the storyteller, Akar the wizard knew how to read. In his case, though, it was a useless talent—for Akar had been blind for the past fifteen years. The loss of his sight had come about not by accident, but rather after great deliberation on his part. He had traded his eyes to a Shaitan in exchange for the ability to know the innermost name of any secret object or person.

Knowing the inner name of something gave Akar great power over it, for he could control it and conjure it as he wished. He considered the trade a wise one, and would not exchange the power he’d gained for his eyes again even if the trade were offered. Eyes could be fooled, eyes could be distracted, eyes were useless half the time in the darkness of night, anyway. He now stood in no danger of being diverted from his serious pursuits by the colors of a sunset or the beauty of a woman. He wore black patches over both his empty sockets and walked unerringly around his castle, whose every twist and turn had long ago been memorized.

Akar lived his life for the accumulation of knowledge and power, and dreamed of the day he would bring his rule of peace and justice to all of Parsina. He knew that, for the present, his goal would have to remain just a dream. Even as Parsina’s most powerful magician, with armies of djinni to fight for him, he still could not conquer all. The Holy City of Ravan would stand against him, and he did not yet have the key to unlock that final barrier. He was not even sure what that key was, but he knew it had to exist somewhere. So he continued his research and his experiments, confident that someday he would indeed find that one clue that would make him master of all the world.

On the night of Hakem Rafi’s burglary of the Royal Temple, Akar sat suddenly up in his large bed. Something had disturbed his normally deep sleep. He listened with ears more sensitive than any normal man’s, but the castle was still and no sounds reached him. The senses of touch, taste, and smell likewise failed to identify the source of the disturbance, so Akar reached out with the senses beyond the body’s to investigate the cause of his awakening.

All of Parsina was underlain with a magical web of light and energy that bound together time and space. Everything that was and everything that might be existed on the web. The death of a star and the birth of a gnat registered on the web, each event to its own degree. A wizard like Akar worked by tracing the lines of confluence and pulling on the strands of the web. This web of reality was Oromasd’s ultimate creation, and by tracing the intricate patterns Akar hoped to control the world.

The web was trembling violently now, as though hit by a major shock. This was no immediate danger to him—Akar had a multitude of protective spells and devices that would alert him of any approaching threat—but instead a major disruption in the orderly flow of the universe. Akar, who strove to know all there was, had to investigate this anomaly.