Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [119]
“All that and more.” The guard laughed, and Lyuba laughed with him. Katya marveled. It was very clear that Lyuba had been making a lot of friends among the guards. Clever of her, for certain.
“Well let me run you that water, before you pass out.” With another bizarre writhing of her form, Lyuba became a Wolf again, and dashed out the door. About that time, the Wili glided quickly into the minstrel’s gallery. “Nothing,” she said. “The hole was empty.”
“Well that just means we won’t have to deal with the throne room. That is not a bad thing,” Katya pointed out as Lyuba dashed into the throne room again, tossed the waterskin she was carrying in her mouth into the air with a flip of her head, and waited for the guard to catch it. It was quite a performance, and clearly one she wasn’t doing for the first time. With a bark and a tail wag, she dashed out again.
A moment later she was back with the rest of them. She jerked her head sideways toward the door; Katya nodded, and they all headed for safer areas. They were courting discovery in the minstrel’s gallery.
As they entered a more public corridor, Yulya stopped. “I can’t bear it anymore. My curiosity is eating me alive, and has been since you joined us. Lyuba, how do you transform and still have clothing?”
The Wolf turned around, and writhed into the girl again. She was laughing. “I’m not,” she said. “It’s an illusion. I’m really absolutely bare. People see what they expect to see, and they don’t expect to see a naked woman running about. Oh, I do wear clothing when I’m going to stay human for a while, but if I’m transforming a great deal, I don’t bother. Go ahead, try to see through the illusion now that you know.”
Katya’s eyes widened, as she did just that, and realized that Lyuba was telling the truth, because there she was…wearing…nothing but air.
Now, this was hardly shocking to her, since most of her father’s subjects tended to be very cavalier about clothing. But Yulya—
Sure enough, Yulya gave a little squeak and hid her eyes. Lyuba transformed back again. But she was still laughing, Wolf-fashion, jaws wide and tongue lolling, as she ran off.
While the others pooled their information and tried to figure out where to look next, Katya was in the stable, consulting with Sergei. “It’s not in any of the hiding places you mentioned,” Katya told the Horse. “So if you were a Jinn, where would you hide a bottle? You don’t want to destroy it, I presume.”
“A smart magician would make sure that destroying the bottle would do something bad to the Jinn,” Sergei replied. “I think we can assume that any magician wise enough to confine a Jinn is going to be sure to take that sort of precaution with the bottle.”
Katya sat down in the straw of the Horse’s stall, just under the manger, with her back to the wall. “Just out of curiosity—why would anyone put a Jinn in a bottle if they are so dangerous? And if you have to imprison it, why put it in a bottle? Why choose something that can be opened again? That doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. I’d imprison him in a crystal or a sealed box and drop it into the deep part of the ocean.”
Sergei tilted his head to the side and one ear flopped over. “Good questions, both. Hmm, well…I assume that you can’t simply destroy a Jinn. The Katschei was supposedly Deathless only because he took steps magically to make himself invulnerable. He wasn’t really a spirit. And most of the creatures we think of as being ‘spirits’ are really quite mortal, they just live a very long time. The Queen of Copper Mountain is one of those, and so are the Baba Yagas. Then on the other hand, you have the Rusalkas that are ghosts, your Guiliette who is the same…and I presume, the Jinn. Pure spirits can take on a physical form, but they don’t need it. And you can’t really destroy them. In the case of a ghost, you can send them on to—whatever fate awaits them, or like the Jinn, you can confine them, or drive them away. But you can’t destroy