Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [84]
Marina nodded sagely. “So my parents who made me said. And so Father Frost says, when he comes to visit me and ask how I am, and remind me not to jump over any fires—”
She stopped there, and a look of horror came over her. Small wonder. A snow maiden would last no longer than a breath if the Jinn set his fires on her.
Lyuba leaped to her side. “I will protect you! He will have to face my teeth if he tries to—”
“The point is to find a way to deal with him so that none of us have to face him without the power being on our side,” Katya reminded them, and Klava nodded.
“I have been going through every book I could find in the castle,” the wizard’s apprentice said. “I wish I had more information. There is not much there about the Jinni. They once lived in a place called the City of Brass, but why they no longer dwell there, the book does not say. Another said that some were good spirits that were imprisoned by evil magi to force them to serve them, and that some were evil spirits locked away by good magi to keep them from harming mankind, and the only way to know which that a Jinn-bottle held was to know the seal of the magi that sealed it in.” She sighed. “Of course, we already know what sort this fellow is.”
Yulya cleared her throat a little. “Are there any laws of magic that could work in our favor?” she asked diffidently.
Klava looked at her, startled. Yulya shrugged. “I am not entirely bird-witted,” she said. “I used to listen to father’s friends. One is a wizard. The Laws—”
“Well,” Klava began. “The Law of Names, really. If we could discover his True Name—”
They all fell silent at that. Everyone knew the power of a True Name. The difficulty was to get hold of it. Magical creatures, spirits like the Jinn, kept their True Names to themselves, and in the normal course of things, probably only one other person or creature would know it, that being the one that had given it to them in the first place.
There were ways to learn the Name; it could be tricked or coerced out of someone, and a powerful enough magician could find a Name with scrying and spells. The trouble with all of those was that they weren’t powerful magicians, and the Jinn wasn’t likely to be tricked.
“Other than that?” Katya asked dryly, and then stopped. “Good heavens. In order to seal him in his bottle in the first place, the magician would have to have known his True Name, right?”
Klava’s eyes widened. “Almost certainly.”
“And it must have been written on the bottle as part of the bindings.”
Klava nodded. “Definitely.”
“And I very much doubt he would have left such a thing lying about to be found and meddled with!” Katya continued, triumphantly. “So his bottle must be here in the castle somewhere.”
Klava’s eyes lit up. “Of course! He must have brought it when he brought me! When we find it—” But there Klava faltered. “I couldn’t read the language myself the last time, and neither could my master. How can we expect to translate enough to tell what his name is?”
Katya’s eyes sparkled. “How do you think I can speak to all of you?” she asked. “It is one of the things that I can do” She looked around at all of them. “Marina, Yulya, you are best suited to talking to the Jinn’s servants. You are both gentle and sweet—no one would suspect you of anything other than curiosity if you asked questions. See if there is some place odd that the Jinn is known to go to, or he has forbidden his servants to enter.”
The snow maiden and the swan maid nodded, and Yulya brightened. She liked talking to people, she was gregarious by nature.
“Lyuba, you can use that clever nose of yours, not only to see if there is an escape from this place, but if you find a place that the Jinn visits often in the castle.”
The Wolf-girl grinned. This just meant she could spend more time in her preferred shape. And Katya could not blame her. The Wolf was ever so much more powerful than the pretty human girl.
“Klava, there may be a way you can find the bottle. Did you not once hold it in your hands?”