In her dream Izzi rushed about on errands. She was for some dream-logic reason still an acolyte in her red robe. Every mage or magian she passed pointed her in a new direction on a different task, until she had no hope of remembering them all. She sped down a Magekadeh tunnel to fetch something, but then she could not even remember what, and started to panic. She turned to run back the other way.

Wake up! Pay attention! The words broke through into her dream, but her dream-mind took them as yet another urgent task. She turned again in her dream-tunnel maze.

Wake up, Izzi, said Mother, who did not belong in the dream.

But it was not Myzina, of course. It was one of her remaining wards, designed to drag Izzi from sleep to face whatever challenged the khan.

“Mother,” sleeping Izzi called softly. “Where?”

A final turn toward the imagined voice tangled her legs in her robe, tripping her up. Her arms sprang out to catch the non-existent fall, wrenching at her shoulder sockets. The jerk woke her instantly. 

Feeling foolish, betrayed by her own mind and body, she untangled herself from her bedsheet, threw it aside, and sat up.

Pay attention!

Shut up! She silently shouted at the book, and clenched her hands in her hair. Leave me be. I’ll get to you.

First she had to make sure they were safe. It was well past midnight and the Khan of Penza seemed at ease, but its protective wards of sorcery vibrated like a cobweb with a new catch. She closed her eyes, sent her own imaginary roots down to mingle with those of the trees, and drew on the timeless throbbing magnetism of the foundation stones. So grounded, she reached out with her magesty, feather light, feeling her way through the invisible web of connections, searching for anything disturbed, anything misplaced, anything newly woven.

Father slept. The servants and staff slept. Down in the courtyard the visiting caravaners and their stabled horses and camels slept. Izzi sucked in a breath of jealous frustration—it felt like she’d had hardly any sleep at all. 

The nightjars out in the apricot trees started up a mournful chittering and the latched windows of her room rattled. The wards were so delicate they drifted like gossamer threads out into the night air, catching a premonition of an approaching presence. Mother had taught her the sorcerer’s skill of holding her thoughts on the knife-edge between asking a question and wanting an answer, and she balanced there as she murmured an incantation, a glamour to hide herself and the household. 

She swung her legs out of bed, wriggled her feet into her favourite slippers, and padded across her carpets to peer out across the rooftops. There! A ghul’s spirit quested through the night, sending a ripple through the twinkling stars as if they were reflections in a disturbed pool. Because the khan was built at the very edge of the city, these invading thoughts sometimes tickled the khan’s wards even before the magians’ own.

She recited a spell her mother had taught to make her own questing spirit seem large and frightening, and challenged the malevolent being. Its disembodied presence cowered back into the desert, reluctant to test her power. 

The Kythians had lately resorted to less-than-wholesome tactics. Izzi thought the ghul may have been dragged from eternal sleep by their mages, which was insanely risky, given the consequences for their souls if the thing turned on them. The questing spirit was a force Izzi could tackle. Kalu had taught them how to repel the actual ghul, if it came to that, but he’d also told them to ready their souls for oblivion—their chances would not be good. 

The nightjars croaked like toads for a while, then eventually fell silent. Quiet minutes passed, and the branches of the apricot trees, draped in the invisible wards, hung heavy and still again. Izzi sensed their roots clawing deep into the rock, bolstering the foundations, and their limbs embracing the timbers of the walls in their deep entanglement with the building. 

With the war getting ever closer, even jackals and some of the big secretive cats had braved the city. Her questing thoughts felt their magesty, along with the comforting presence of the khan, its ancient illustrated stones and timbers proud and strong.

Down in the courtyard, the caravaners, horses, and camels breathed deeply and silently, never knowing the work Izzi did to protect them. Satisfied any danger had passed, she turned her thoughts back to the book.

Once Hakim had finally turned up, they’d returned to find the khan in a flurry of activity to prepare for the evening. The caravan would normally only stay one day, leaving in the cool of dusk for a night of travel, but its delay meant they had to host the horde of hungry caravaners day by day. After grabbing a tiny chance to hide the book in her room, she’d been put to work with everyone else. Even after the evening meal she’d been harried by her stepmother Nezta and the servants to help, and when she’d finally got to bed had just collapsed with exhaustion.

Now she second-guessed her foolishness. If by any chance the book was missed or something had been suspected she was in deep trouble. Something had lured her with the possibility of secrets about her mother—but she knew a projection from a shadow being might be able to work on her own doubts, building something from nothing to manipulate her. 

She shouldn’t have used her mother’s spell in the Grimoiren. She shouldn’t have climbed higher than the novice levels. And most definitely, she should not have used a shimmer to hide the old whispering book within her dress, or used a forbidden spell to still the wards and sneak it out of the protected magian compound. 

She wondered why she always took such risks. She’d always had doubts. Mother had often said words like, “Take care Izzi, we are not in my homeland. Trust me and trust yourself, but with others, take care.” But there were things she hadn’t said, such as why she had left her homeland. Others must know, including anyone old enough to have lived in the khan when Father married her. Father knew, of course. If only people shared the truth with her, she might just trust them more. They either thought they were protecting her from it, or they were protecting themselves. Direct questions always just brought evasions and stares. Whispers in the background, and stares.

Mother would have understood. Mogh Kalu’s teachings were so slow, held back to the pace of her fellow noviciates, and Izzi had lost all patience for that. If she followed all the rules she’d remain no more than the kept daughter of a merchant’s spurned wife forever. 

Now, knowing the khan was calm, finally it was time to delve into the book’s secrets, even though she knew it was dangerous. A twirl of the brass wheel to turn up the lamp threw flickering colours onto the bookshelf where Myzina’s old journals were crammed. 

Izzi had wedged it in so tightly that some of the journals wanted to come out with it. Perhaps her mother’s spirit was guarding it. She chided them gently, her old friends, and pushed them back into place, drawing out the fragile, cloth-bound tome.

A Treatise on Kyth Histories, by A. Anakzar.

Why exactly it had called to her, of all people, Izzi was not sure. She blew off the dust and stifled a sneeze at the musty scent of the centuries-old parchment and its tang of ancient magic. Particles sparkled in the hot air over the lamp as she opened the cover, full of anticipation.

But inside, instead of ancient wisdom about the enemy kingdom of Kythia, the land of her mother’s birth, or any terrible secrets about her mother, the book seemed merely a handwritten copy of an old children’s book she knew and loved, The Waves of a Thousand Oceans, about a sailor named Haroun who told stories of adventures in faraway lands to the whale that had swallowed him, in the vain hope it might spit him out. Izzi had a vivid flashback of her mother reading it to her, and remembered one favourite tale about a sad girl-fish with a face like the moon that she would demand be read again and again. Had she imagined it all? Had she stolen a forbidden tome only to find a child’s bedtime story?

Talk to me, book, she thought, probing at it with her magesty. Nothing.

She clenched her fists. Clearly this was just some warding magic hiding the true content. She scanned the words thoroughly for coded spells or messages—nothing. She spent the next hour trying every sorcerous means she knew or could find in her mother’s journals to unlock the secret of the book, but to no avail. It really did seem just a children’s book. When she closed it now even the cover title had changed to match the contents. 

Talk to me, book, she implored again and again. The voice that was once so annoying now remained silent. Dead or merely sleeping? Or had she only imagined it all along? Bitter disappointment made her tired face sag, and she let out a huge sigh. Yes, she’d told it to shut up—but not forever. Her stomach sank. All those risks, and now one moment of frustration cost her everything?

There was nothing more she could do tonight. She’d try again later—after some much-needed sleep. 

She collected and neatly shelved the scattered journals, and finally lifted the heavy book to return it to its secret place on the shelf, but as she did the back cover swung open, and a piece of loose paper fell out and drifted onto her illustrated carpet.

Izzi scooped it up, expecting just a page torn from the book. It certainly was that, but the coloured light from her lamp shone through the page to reveal something more, something scrawled slantwise across a telling of one of Haroun’s adventures, highlighting it in a vivid green.

It was an ancient script, but one her mother had taught her to read when Izzi was only nine, in the year she had died.

Izzi knew better than to read all the words in the written order, but she could tell immediately it was a charm for summoning an ifrit djinni. 

Oh, this was not good!

She slipped the page back into the book and slapped it shut with an echoing thud. She returned to bed, but the windows started to rattle again, and the nightjars resumed their mournful chittering. On the bench the book began to whisper like the muttering of trapped souls. She wrapped the bedsheet around herself like a cocoon, as if it could block out the whispering. But the book was awake again now. And it would not be ignored.

✨