“Do I frighten you in this shape?” it asked, even more coyly than before. “Would you like to see me in human form?”
Tony made an inarticulate noise. The face atop the whirlwind giggled. The mist thickened. Substance seemed to flow upward into it from the ground. A human form appeared in increasing substantiality in the mist. The round face shrank and appeared in more normal size and proportion on the materializing human figure. Tony’s mouth dropped open. He abruptly ceased to disbelieve in the existence of djinns. He was prepared to concede also the existence of efreets, ghuls, leprechauns, ha’nts, Big Chief Bowlegs, the spirit control, and practically anything anybody cared to mention. Because from the small whirlwind a convincingly human female form had condensed.
The pink-skinned, rather pudgy, quite unclothed figure cast a look of arch coyness upon Tony.
“Do you prefer me as a human woman?” asked the figure, giggling. “I would like for you to like me…” Tony caught his breath with difficulty.
“Why—er—yes, of course. But—just in case somebody looks in the gate, hadn’t you better put some clothes on?”
The djinnee who called herself Nasim looked down at her human body and said placidly:
“Oh. I forgot.”
Garments began to materialize. And then there was a clanking at the gate, and then a howl of fury, and a flintlock musket boomed thunderously in the confined space of the courtyard. The pink-skinned, pudgy female form seemed to rush outward in all directions. There was a roaring of wind. A dark whirlwind, giggling excitedly, sped upward and fled away. Even in flight, and in the form of a whirlwind, it looked somehow rotund and it looked somehow sentimental.
Then Tony was almost trampled down by half a dozen soldiers with baggy trousers and slippers and flintlock guns which banged and smoked futilely at the vanishing patch of smoke in the sky. And there was a fat man with a purple-dyed beard, and there was Ghail, the slave girl, with a good deal more clothes on than before. She looked at Tony with a distinctly unpleasant expression on her face.
“Now,” said Ghail ominously, “would you tell me the meaning of the djinn hussy, without any clothes on, in the very palace of Barkut?”