Lying wakeful in bed in the royal suite of the palace, Tony surveyed this statement of the situation with distrust. It sounded naive and improbable, like something out of the Arabian Nights. It was. Like all the events stemming from his purchase of a ten-dirhim piece in an antique shop on West 45th Street, New York, it was so preposterous that he pinched himself for assurance that his present surroundings were real.
They were. The pinch hurt like the devil. He rubbed it, scowling. Then he heard a thud on the windowsill of his bedroom. He got out of bed, suspicious. He went to the window. Nothing. It looked out upon a small garden, there to please the occupants of this suite. There were grass and shrubbery and small trees and a fountain playing in the starlight. It smelled inviting. Beyond lay the palace, and beyond that the city, and beyond that the oasis and the desert. And somewhere—somewhere unguessable—lay the dominions and the stronghold of the djinn beyond the desert.
His conscience wrung its hands. In the fix he was in, to be thinking about djinns and captive queens and such lunatic items! How about those fine plans for an import-export business between Barkut and New York? What had he learned about the commercial products of Barkut? What was the possible market for American goods? If he went, with no more than he now knew, to an established firm in New York to get them to take up the matter, what information could he give them that would justify them in offering him an executive position? Why, if he’d only confined his attention to proper subjects like exports and imports instead of trying to rouse the romantic interest of a long-legged slave girl, nobody would ever have thought of asking him to lead an army.
Rubbing his leg where it hurt, he gazed out into the garden and rudely thrust his conscience aside. That garden looked romantic in the starlight. He wouldn’t mind being out there right now with Ghail…
Something stirred on the windowsill almost beside his hand. He started, and in starting dislodged one of the soft silken cushions that were everywhere about this place. It fell to the floor. He saw a tiny dark shape on the sill, like a frog. He groped for a shoe to swat it with, and it jumped smartly into the room. It was a frog. He could tell by the way it jumped… but it landed on the cushion with a whacking, smacking “thud” such as no frog should make. It sounded like a couple of hundred pounds of steel mashing a pillow flat and banging against the floor beneath. The pillow, in fact, burst under the impact. Stray particles of stuffing flew here and there. The frog disappeared within. From the interior of the burst cushion came explosive swearing in a deep bass voice.
Then the split silken covering inflated and burst anew, and a swirling luminous mist congealed into a solid shape, and Tony found himself staring at an essentially human form. It had the most muscle-bound arms and shoulders he had ever seen, however, and a chest like a wine cask, and a wrestler’s knotty legs. Its head and face were of normal size; but it took no effort whatever to realize that the features were those of a djinn. The slanting, feral eyes, the white tusks projecting slightly from between the lips, the pointed ears—it was a djinn, all right, and a djinn in a terrible temper.
“Mortal!” it roared. “You are that strange prince who came across the desert!”
Tony swallowed.
The creature revealed additional inches of tusk.
“You are that creature, that mere human, who ensnared the love of Nasim, the jewel among djinnees!” It pounded its chest, which resounded like a tympany. “Know, mortal, that I am Es-Souk, her betrothed! I have come to tear you limb from limb!”