Ghail turned her head and whispered in his ear, strangling with fury:
“As soon as you have destroyed the djinn I am going to kill you!”
Tony beamed in the darkness inside the small cabin on top of the lurching camel. Ghail held his hands, muttering fiercely. His arm was about her shoulders. The combination made the bumping and swaying and unholy undulations of the beast not at all annoying—to Tony.
“There’s another thing I’d like to ask about,” he said cheerfully. “When you were teaching me to speak your language, you wore a very sensible hot-weather costume. I mean, there wasn’t too much of it. About like the bathing suits girls wear back at home. And you very properly didn’t seem embarrassed. But that was only when you thought I was a djinn. As soon as you found out I wasn’t, you got all bothered. In fact, you blushed in the most unlikely places… Why?”
She said through clenched teeth:
“Djinns are not human. I would not be embarrassed before a cat, either. Or a slave. But a man, yes!”
“Yet Esir and Esim—”
“They would have been embarrassed too, before they were given to you and were your slaves.” Her voice quivered with fury. “I am dressed as I am because I travel with you.”
Then she hissed into his ear:
“When this is over I will see that you are boiled in oil! You will be fed to dogs! You will be torn into little pieces—”