The rains have not come in months, and the oasis at the base of our carved Petra cliff is running dry. The griffins are growing hungry, and the goats are thin, and I am beginning to lose my ample curves, but Ghazal and I make do with treasure scavenged from the ruins and sold to the stingy djinn at half price.
I am picking at a handful of dates in the Ifrit markets while Ghazal is out exercising his wings. I'm in an alleyway between two mudbrick huts painted robin eggshell blue to ward off evil with intricate Hands of Fatima and evil eyes. There were many robins with tiny eggs like the sky in my kingdom, fertile valleys and rolling hills and petty princes fat off their father's riches. I have no use for birds that squabble over roosts, and all there are in Lotan are golden eagles and vultures and scrappy desert birds that peck at cacti and dirt.
My favorite djinn, a wind-worn mother of five – Daja - with a paunch and wrinkles like tilled sand, her skin smoldering coals, is playing with her precious children. The little djinn here play with golden jewels and emeralds made into dolls their parents have found with phoenix-light in the ruins. Her youngest – Ahmed – plays with a sapphire carved soldier. The rains have not come, they are missing like Scherezade from her king's bed, off chasing a thousand and one stories, and the djinn are hungry. I share some dates, the children laugh, and Daja smiles like sunlight on well water.
My poetry is making me money, with human travelers daring Lotan's wastes from far kingdoms to sit and hear me recite my ghazals and sonnets and haikus on my sitar, paying for my singing in plentiful platinum and diamond. Half of them are scouts from my enemy betrothed – Malkira - and I have Ghazal slit the spy's throats with his talons. Their jewels are useful, them ratting out the pathways to my hideout less so. Lotan is the land of legends, but even legends can be found by any unscrupulous mercenary that bribes a djinn with fiery wine.
"The clouds are arcing west. Rain," Daja says in her plain way, her skin hardened like lava with veins of yellow and red that steam pours from. I lounge on her divan and braid the hot smoldering hair of one of her girls.
I follow her gaze to where Ghazal is chasing a dakini. "With rain comes travelers seeking shelter. Is your inn open for guests? I can help make the beds and brew the saffron tea."
"That would be a blessing, sweet Habibi."
I sometimes forget my name is Rani, with all the friends and creatures of legend that call me beloved. Humans are fragile here, but I am an iron rose, and my bones are angel adamantine.
We ready Daja's guest rooms and sit under her tent fronting her two-story mudbrick inn drinking saffron tea. It is a djinn favorite pastime. All Daja must do is boil the kettle in her hands and the tea steeps and the saffron bulbs release their sweet odor, blossoming open in the dregs to spice our drinks. I must admit, it is an acquired taste for a human, but I do not really know how human I am anymore. The children have all fallen asleep, and the stars are out, and the rains fall, making cacti bloom.
Sand whips up with a thunderhead. The dakinis dance under the Milky Way. Peris move their caravans through the skies.
Someone is coming.
A guest arrives – a desert warrior with a scimitar at his back on a stubborn camel. I can smell the enchantment on him: black rags are around his face and his sword is bloody. His eyes are as green as a new onion but his skin is dark as night. All I can see are his nose bridge, thick black brows, and gaze – the rest is all ripped fabric and fraying bloody bandages.
The djinn in the market fall silent, sizing up their new potential predator or prey. To me, he is all desert lion, a jackal, and black magick sizzles on his Hand of Fatima branded palms. I can smell the rot of death on him, but it is sickly sweet, like a perfume of rotting wine, and I know in that instance he is one of Izrail's – a necromancer to be sure, or I cannot write rhyming couplets. The bones of desert hares perk up and hop about by his camel's feet and the spine of a rattlesnake follows him, hissing with its vertebrae.
Ghazal screeches and fans his tailfeathers, divebombing down into the middle of the market to place his spread wings square between me and the man who makes the dead dance.
The necromancer's camel rears and his robes and rags whip in the tailwind of Ghazal's flapping. He lets out a muffled laugh like bones rattling and calms his mount. From his drawstring bag the necromancer draws a silver bell shaped like a leaf. Ghazal recognizes it in an instant – one of the bells from Mikhail's gardens at the edges of our paradise of Lote Trees, where the Prophet saw angels dancing on every leaf in the bark body of the living tree Samrafil. The leaves are a sign of peace around all a thousand and one kingdoms, but especially potent in Lotan where magic is amplified by the fantastic residents. One ring peals, and it soothes, and even the smell of his rot is like a song.
Ghazal kneels and chirrups. "So you are one of Izrail's men, come in peace to the lands where malakhim are tempted away from Allah by sweet wines and sweeter still dakinis and djinni. What business have you here, necromancer?"
The necromancer puts the Lote Tree bell back in his pocket, and I can almost see a smile under his bloody rags. For every death reversed, a sacrifice to Allah and his triple-faced daughters Allat, Uzza, and Manat. His skin must be punctured with scars from his scimitars, ceremonial magick sigils carved like poetry in Arabic swirls across his chest, his back, his solar plexus. I want to drink down his death and write a poem of pain and ecstasy. My hand itches for my quill, but I focus and calm Daja, whose hand trembles around her tea cup.
The necromancer dismounts his camel and walks past Ghazal as if he were a chick newly hatched. He comes and kneels before me, reins pressed against his chest, and his golden camel kisses the sand. "I am here for the Queen of the Ruins, to seek audience with slender-ankled Rani, the bride that fled her marriage aback a roc for Lotan, Land of No Return. I am here to make a bargain: I will kill Malkira for you and put to rest his undead army that so disgusted you and now marches on the borders of Lotan, all for a poem of me and my travels, Izad of the Moon Kingdom."
I arch my brow in the manner perfected in my father's courts, neither disproval or approval, simply watching like the malakhim from Paradise on high. "Izad. Your name is a funny thing for he who walks with death. Are you also a being of air, winged messenger of Allah? But no, you come from his daughter's land, sweet Allat of skin like milk and eyes silver as new coins. And you reek of the slain. There is little angelic about you, Izad. I grant you audience, but poems from the Queen of the Ruins are costly, and how am I to know Malkira marches on Lotan by hedging my faith on the words of a mongrel ghoul-raiser?"
The camel spits on the ground and Izad's eyes flash acidic. But it is a kind alchemy, and the rotting rose scent turns to one of ant-eaten peonies and leftover yesterday's dew. He lifts the black bloody rags covering his face to show me Malkira's mark on his head necromancer: a bone-slit nose hole and lips once sewn shut with phoenix tendons to enslave the necromancer to Malkira's service, now scarred and puckered, for he is free.
Ice cold dread freezes my veins, and Ghazal devours the camel in one gulp. It screeches as its spine snaps and it falls into my roc's gullet.
"You are one of Malkira's," I state, in shock, and all my poetry and poise flees me. Instead I am back in a forced marriage to the king of the cruel dead, and my father is laughing at my tears, and I am flying away from the only home I have ever known on Ghazal's still premature back. The night swallows me and the peonies and dew drown my senses until I am swimming in this Izad, senseless and terrified.
"Was one of Malkira's. Now I am one of Allat's. She slit the bindings on my lips and marked me as her own. I may be Izrail's son, but my mistress is the Goddess of the Moon Kingdom. Death and moonlight are the perfect marriage, after all, and with Allat on my side, I can murder all of Malkira's ghouls. I raised them from the dead, after all. It is the greatest curse and greatest gift my malakhim father gave me, not that he gave me anything much but a name and absence from my life from my conception. Angels are flighty like that, I suppose."
Daja's children have all run to their rooms, and she is cleaning up their mess frantically. I part my hijab to see Izad clearer in the wind, and in his green onion eyes I remember him, flanking my ruin.