Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [122]
“Only volcanoes,” Katya replied, and watched with fascination as Klava used the scissors-like object to deftly seize the long neck of the bottle and pull it out. She set it right in the mouth of the oven, though, where it was still very hot—
“Let it sit there, and I’ll move it again in a little,” Klava ordered. “Taking it out right now and putting it on the floor might make it shatter, and I assume we don’t want that. I’ll come back in a bit and move it when it cools some.” She went back to the cake-making while Katya stared at the bottle, willing it to cool.
It was not like any bottle she had ever seen before. It started with a very long, thin neck, which then widened out into a wide, squat bottom. Instead of a wooden stopper, which would in any event have probably become charcoal in the oven, there was a glass or porcelain one, still attached to the neck by a chain.
“Klava,” she called softly, “when you saw the bottle, was it only stoppered, or was it stoppered and sealed?”
“Stoppered and sealed,” Klava called back, interrupting her own explanation of how to beat nuts into the batter. “But the seal was plain wax, there was nothing written on it.”
“The wax was probably bespelled,” the Horse observed, “but it shouldn’t have been a vital part of the magic to draw the Jinn into the bottle.”
She hoped so. It would be disastrous to discover they were missing part of the magic because the wax had burned away.
Klava came over to the oven with the first tray of cakes. She held her bare hand near the bottle and nodded. She slid the tray into the oven, then took the tongs and moved the bottle to the floor.
“Let it cool a bit more, then you can handle it,” she said, going back for another tray.
But regardless of the heat radiating off the bottle, Katya was already leaning forward to try and read the writing—because what she had at first thought was only a spiraling stripe was actually a spiraling line of writing, inscribed into the dark green glass of the bottle, then filled with white enamel.
“Fire smite thee, Zephyr blight thee, Water blind thee, Earth then bind thee,” she read, and looked up. “What does all that mean?”
“It sounds to me as if there are supposed to be all four elemental powers involved in stuffing him into the bottle,” Klava said with a frown. “The fire power to actually fight him, the air to weaken him, the water to confuse him and the earth power to bind his power and send him into the vessel. Is there any more?”
She bent closer. “It’s written there three times, then this: ‘Iblis Afrit En Kalael, I command thee in the Names of the Law, be bound into this vessel until released by the hand of a virgin of five and fifty years.”
Klava began to laugh. She had to put the tray of unbaked cakes she was carrying down, she was laughing so hard. Tears began to come from her eyes, and she wiped them with the back of her hand.
“What?” asked Magda, curiously. “What is being so very amusing?”
“Oh, blasted Tradition,” Klava replied, picking up the tray and inserting it into the oven, and fishing out the first one with the set of tongs. “Honestly. I suppose you have to put a condition on these things, but I would have looked longer and harder for one, personally. Like ‘Until twelfth of never’ or some such thing. Still.” She began laughing again. “Poor master! No wonder he always had a steady supply of unicorn hair!”
“But now we know the creature’s true name,” pointed out the Horse. “Iblis Afrit En Kalael. All we have to do now is assemble the company to fight and bind him. I will return to Sasha and the dragons. But first—” He yearned toward the tray of crisp brown cakes “—could I have one of those, please?”
Chapter 18
The forest they stood in was cool, verdant, flourishing. Five paces away, however, the land was all but dead. There was no sign of the trees that had once