Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [105]
She waved a hand dismissively. “It does not belong there. The Tradition will arrange for it to be taken away.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps The Tradition will be changed.” He continued to stare at the Jinn’s desert. “The Tradition has been changed before, and it can be again. Do you know what is there?”
Silence for a moment. “Personally? No….”
“It is called, I believe, a Jinn.”
She murmured something to the attendant. Sasha continued to stand, staring out of the window, as the attendant left, then returned. He turned back to see that there was now a fourth person in the room, a fellow with the bent-shouldered look of a scholar about him. The Queen looked to Sasha. “What did you call the creature again?” she asked.
“A Jinn,” Sasha repeated.
At a look from the Queen, the newcomer cleared his throat. “A Jinn, Majesty, is a being said to be born of fire. Although physical, it is not, and never has been, human. My sources are mixed as to whether it is or is not mortal. It cannot abide water or many green things, finding its home in the desert. In some ways, it acts very mortal, having dwellings, marrying, begetting children. There are said to be two sorts, the lawless and the law-abiding. The latter dwell in the City of Brass, in the Kingdom of the Empty Quarter, so called because it is all desert. The former may be anywhere in the lands surrounding that Kingdom.” With a significant glance at Sasha, he continued. “It is, I believe, those with which we are concerned. The Lawless Jinni acknowledge neither master nor ruler, nor abide by any laws, and seldom make alliances even with their own kind. Each seeks to create a Kingdom of his own, accumulate power, and eventually, to overwhelm and enslave all Jinni it encounters, turning the land to desert and slaying or capturing all that are not Jinni. Being powerful magicians, and able to accrete power by extracting it from others, they have little or no use for the items most other beings consider valuable. Wealth they count only in terms of power. Art gives them no joy. They are immune to most feelings.”
“That,” Sasha said into the silence, “is probably why the Jinn rejected trade with your Kingdom, Majesty.”
The scholar nodded cautiously.
The Queen looked just the faintest bit irritated. “Then let him sit there in splendid isolation. If he has no need of what I can offer, then I have no need of him.”
Sasha scratched his head. “There’s a bit of a problem with that, Majesty. You see, he isn’t satisfied with just having what he has. By his very nature he wants everything. In fact, unless I’m very much mistaken, you’ll find his patch of desert has been growing since he arrived.”
Again the Queen sent a sharp glance toward her scholarly adviser, who nodded reluctantly. “It has doubled in size, Majesty.”
“The Tradition makes him do what the Katschei did—hold lovely young women captive. But he’s using that, using The Tradition against itself. He needs more magic than he has just in himself, and The Tradition makes it easy for him to abduct young women—so he abducts only those that have power, either inherent or because they are naturally creatures of magic.” He grimaced. “Like my betrothed, except that she allowed herself to be taken on her father’s orders to find out what had happened to a missing swan maiden. The message she got out to us said there were several more captives in the Castle and if I were to venture a guess, I would say that every time he takes a girl, his desert gets a little bigger.”
The Queen bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. “I do not see what this has to do with me,” she replied.
Sasha paused while he sorted through possible answers. “Well…for one thing, you are going to lose your trading partners. Nothing can live in that desert but him. Sooner or later, everyone you’ve traded with will be gone