Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [127]
The eyes of the Jinn met the eyes of the Queen—and the Jinn’s were the ones that showed fear.
Two voices roared out of the sky. “Iblis Afrit En Kalael, we smite thee!”
Sasha’s arms tightened around Katya, as he sang, “Iblis Afrit En Kalael, I blight thee!”
Katya called up her waterspout again and shouted with all of her strength, “Iblis Afrit En Kalael, I blind thee!”
And slowly, the right hand of the Queen of the Copper Mountain rose, until the index finger pointed at the Jinn, the rest curled against her palm. “Iblis Afrit En Kalael, I bind thee!”
With a scream, the Jinn started to struggle, as wisps of fog, tendrils of flame, a blast of wind carrying the dust of malachite that lifted from the earth at the Queen’s command, all began to circle him. Wordlessly he howled as Fire, Water, Air, and Earth formed into dark green chains, chains that encircled him, wrapped him in their coils, and bound him tightly.
Katya snatched up the half-forgotten bottle and pulled out the stopper, holding it with the open neck, pointing it at the now fruitlessly writhing Jinn. Everything she had talked about with Sergei surged through her mind, and she knew at that moment what she was going to say.
“Iblis Afrit En Kalael, we command thee in the name of the Law, in the name of Justice, in the name of Compassion and in the name of Peace, to be bound into this vessel until you repent and reform, and join the ranks of the Lawful Jinn of the City of Brass!”
With a terrible cry, the Jinn, chains and all, dissolved into green vapor, vapor that was sucked into the bottle in the time it took for hearts to beat twice. As the last of it vanished, Katya grabbed the stopper and drove it into the top, and the Queen of Copper Mountain made another little gesture, and the last of the malachite dust still hanging in the air coalesced about the top of the bottle, forming into a malachite seal that covered the entire top. “There will be no more deserts here,” the Queen said, coldly.
Only then did the Queen look into Katya’s eyes, and smile.
“An interesting choice,” she said. And the malachite column shrank back into the earth, taking the Queen with it.
With a thunder of wings, the dragons landed beside them.
“Looks like we won!” Adamant said with a gleeful grin.
Katya sighed, put the bottle down carefully at her feet, and with weary joy felt Sasha’s arms go around her again.
“Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Yes we did.”
EPILOGUE
The desert was gone. Once again, the Castle of the Katschei was surrounded by forest.
But it was forest that was very much changed.
Gone was the briar maze that had once surrounded the Castle. In its place was a lake—the water was far too wide to be called a moat—with the Castle as an island in the center of it. The miners and excavators of Copper Mountain, it seemed, were also superb engineers. A canal cut to the broad Viridian River kept the lake filled and provided access to and from the sea, at need.
Where the fountain had once been, there was now a much more elaborate construction that, paradoxically, looked utterly natural, a high mound that mimicked the shape of Copper Mountain, with the water from the spring flowing down the side in a waterfall, and channeled out of the garden to end in the lake.
The Castle, newly cleaned, revealed itself to be made, not of grim grey granite, but a rosier form of the same stone. The gardens were bidding fair to be second to none. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, since they were in the charge of a small, dark woman with a mysterious smile and amazing ways with plants. She was aided in this by her partner, a quiet, contained girl who spoke mostly to animals and had made it clear to the creatures of the forest which items