Chapter One
In those very old days, I was a scribe of the third tier under Khufurah's administrative service. In the days before paper, I shuffled papyrus. It was to be my life, as decreed by the gods at the time of my birth, slaving away for the greater glory of Egypt. You young ones speak of wishing to be famous, glorious; we knew that was for others.
And I never sought any glory, nor any acclaim. I sought to be the very best at what the gods made me. And part of that included cleaning up any rubbish that I found clogging the alley of my wattle-and-daub house.
I know, I know. You think we lived in pyramids. Right. Of course. I mean, just think of those hundreds of people who live in the statue of liberty. Same thing, just, you know. Morbid.
What we had is pretty much what you'll find today in the backwaters of Egypt, houses the color of sand, the texture of stone, and with no windows, meaning... any guesses? Yes. Sand.
But that sand was forever blowing in from outside of the delta, where we lived in a paradise of growing things. So we swept. Often. But like any society that had not yet evolved to include garbage delivery and its apparently necessary associated organized crime families, there was always the issue of where the unwanted went. It often seemed that it went to wherever its unhappy owner could put it that did not immediately result in yelling or violence. So it was no surprise to find that there were half a dozen broken bottles strewn across the alleyway behind my house. On reflection, I could even remember the sound of shattering waking me just enough to go directly back to sleep with my darling wife held that much more closely against me. Ah, but where are my manners? My darling wife, Bekhat, is the sweet form beside me. Bekhetaten if you're feeling formal, but as when naked beneath a thick blanket on a chill night, I was most certainly not. I was feeling exhausted, then I was feeling the warm curve of her back pressing into me and the fullness of her breast cupped in my hand, and shortly thereafter only pleasant dreams followed.
Ah, but so easy to lose track. Bottles! Broken ones! In a heavily sandal-focused society, broken glass is rather a problem. I had no children as of yet, though not for lack of trying, but still had no interest in the neighbors' children being lacerated, so it was time to fetch the broom, the dustpan and a good solid grumble about inconsiderate drunks.
Not all drunks, mind you, just the inconsiderate ones. We were all drunks. It was what was done for about half the year while the Nile and its attendant gods were busy restoring everything.
An example: your popular image of the pyramids being raised up by masses of slaves was pretty solidly finished off when the world's oldest recorded "sick off work" note was found in the archaeological investigation of a pyramid construction site. The excuse for ol' Hemiunu to have missed work? Hangover. All the same, glass was a combination of expensive and dangerous that called for a bit of respect.
Did I know anything about any palaces having been robbed, about Ali Baba and his great theft of the twenty bottled Djinn of our prince? Of course not. I had no way of knowing that some madman had lost these bottles while jinking a flying carpet through waves of arrows with his prizes. I didn't even know about the Ten Untamed, the djinni who escaped when their bottles were shattered. To tell the truth, I didn't even know that our rulers had ever managed to take the bottled Djinni from the Arab traveler Abdallah who had used them to conquer Ashtir, the city that had been burned to ash thirty years before. It's not like there was a daily news papyrus, and our rumor mill tended to be rather less involved in the doing of the great and good and more focused on local scandal; our rulers were gods upon the Earth, perfect and unchanging. That made gossip a mixture of boring, dangerous and blasphemous, whereas gossip about whether Alina the fishwife really fucked Mahmud the silo guard behind the Eastern market wall last week was both salacious and harmless.
So it was that I was in a state of perfectly unconcerned ignorance while picking up the one remaining bottle. It was quite lovely, after all, a calming shade of deep blue and, on a day that was promising the sort of muggy misery that gives mosquitoes hard-ons, it was cool to the touch. In case it ever comes up in your daily lives, pressing a Djinn's bottle against your forehead in an attempt to cool down does, in fact, count as rubbing the bottle. Technicalities, hey? I have suspected for ages that the first demon was named "lawyer."
As everyone knows, when it comes to the freeing of Djinns, there are generally good and bad consequences. Generally heavily tipped to the bad side. The best that can be said of most Djinn summoners is that they learned a lesson of great value. The downside is that they have so often learned it in the process of being burned, impaled, rent limb from limb and devoured. Among those who have dealt with these matters for long years, such a fate is known as the Djinn Barbecue, and regarded as a middling death. Not great, like the classic Crushed to Death At Orgasm, but quite a bit better than that old favorite, Immortality Spent in a Bottle of Magical Fire.
What I'm getting at is that, when that Djinn appeared, a hundred hundred legends came crashing into my mind, and the overarching theme uniting them was, loosely translated from the Egyptian, You Are So Fucked. The immediate options that presented themselves were along the lines of suicide, fleeing, and fleeing far enough that I could commit suicide without the Djinn stopping me. I would have opted for one of these without any hesitation, but even when so terrified that I am near to wetting myself, I have never been beyond the ability to appreciate the female form. And this was a form worthy of more than mere appreciation; it called out for study, intimate if possible, followed by either worship or a spirited attempt at ravaging.
The great beauties of egypt have in the main been dusky, as is the general nature of my people, and so a beauty this pale was enough to arrest the eye. The pale being a pale blue made things yet more notable. I'm sure that you have seen images of Djinn, likely clothed in nothing more than a loincloth, their massive chests bulging with muscle over crossed arms. The arms were indeed crossed, and the wardrobe was indeed nothing more than a loincloth, and the chest did undeniably bulge, but it was not with muscle. That she (for there could be no doubt of the correctness of the pronoun) was lounging in the air a pace or so above the alleyway's litter left me at roughly eye level with the most magnificent breasts that I had ever had the pleasure to encounter. Even now, three thousand years hence, I doubt that I have seen their equal, however I may have tried to replicate the effect. Perhaps I am myself the missing element.
Yet once I had pried my eyes from her chest, being sure to give a thorough look past the thin pinch of her waist, the full swell of her hips and the perfect lines of the lovely legs that were demurely crossed as though seated upon a chair that was real only for her, I came to the face of my beautiful nightmare. Her eyes were perfectly kohled around a startling shade of purple that seemed to glow out from within, her nose small and pert, and her mouth had the smile of a cat looking down at pinned prey, including the fangs. Seeing her teeth, I remembered that running would have been the wisest option, but of course, by then it was too late. I was to be prey. Whensoever I think back upon what I did to that mythical woman, the reminder of that hungry smile is enough to dispel any stirrings of guilt. It is easy to condemn the man who poaches a lion for money. It is harder to condemn the man who slays the lion that had its jaws halfway around his throat.
"Massster," she purred. "Another master. Soooooo long it has been, master, that I feared that I would never again be released. I had come quite close to resigning myself to an eternity within that cage." With every word, she drifted closer to me, and I would not have believed, had I not seen it myself, that one could have a sway in their hips as they floated without steps. "I had gone through times when I swore I would kill every human I could find upon release, and others when I swore I would make my emancipator a god among them."
"During which have I found you, oh great Djinn?" I managed to squeak. To my great relief, and sparing my ancestors the shame of my cowardice, though it was a squeak that emerged from my mouth, that squeak did not quaver. One must take the victories where they find them; you try being witty while your body is simultaneously telling you that you are about to die horribly and that you have never been so aroused in your life. I suspect that it was only my iron-hard erection that prevented me from wetting myself.
"Between the two, I feel," she teased, flicking one razored nail across my nose. Blood dripped softly. "I will grant you one wish, then I will tear you into the smallest pieces any man has ever been torn into, swallow those pieces, and let them stew within me for an eon. Are you prepared, small human?"
"And if I do not make the wish?" She pressed yet closer up against me. Her chest was a lush valley below my chin.
"Then," she moaned in a voice of honeyed lust, "we may move directly to the tearing. Where shall I begin?"
"My wish!" I shouted. "I must decide my wish!"
"As you will, oh wise and great master," she said, withdrawing from me with a bow and a smirk.
And this was the crux of things. One wish. No three wishes, with the last fixing the former two, but a single wish with which to both save my life and elevate it above the humble state it had thus far endured.
"Hurry, great master. My hunger can wait only so long. Shall we say one hundred heart beats?" Given the rate at which my heart was pounding, that was enough time to perhaps say one quarter of a prayer to the gods about to receive the shredded lumps of my soul, or time enough to make the largest gamble my life had ever known. Now, as anyone who knows anything about Djinni knows, they were not given intelligence to match their incredible power. And with even this brief pause, I felt that I was being given a chance to get my own wits gathered up and get myself killed trying to be clever.
"I wish for the power to make any woman, human or otherwise, love me so utterly as to willingly devote herself to me as a slave." I blurted it out, somehow finding the words and feeling as though I was talking my way across a razorwire tightrope.
"And what is to prevent me from becoming your own victim, great master?" she asked, drifting around my shoulders and back before me like a lazy swimmer. I focused past the rush of her softness gliding along my arm.
Now dance on that wire, you fool! I thought. "Quite simply, my lovely servant, I do not think such a thing could possibly be done." The offense in her eyes gave me some hope as she stopped dead. "I am scarcely above a worm to you, oh great Djinn. How could you even consider me worthy of anything more than your passing amusement, a snack at most?"
"You doubt the powers of the Djinn?" she seemed uncertain as to whether she was being insulted, and if so, how.
"Never! The powers of the Djinni are legend a thousand times over!" I was near to babbling as she resumed her circling, and had I ever seen such things, I would have been thinking of sharks. As it was I had visions of crocodiles. "I am, after all, nothing more than a meal to you. And that is why I know that even if I were granted such a power, you could never succumb to it in your greatness. And so, what could be lost by showing your strength to my unworthy self, that I may have a last glimpse of your glory before meeting my fate?"
She stopped her drift in front of me again. Those lovely lavender eyes had grown distant, and their glow faded a bit, as she sought to follow my logic without apparent success. In true Djinn fashion, she seized upon the part that she had understood.
"It is true, you are as nothing before my greatness..." she mused. "And no Djinn has anything to fear from any mortal. So be it! Your wish, my master, is granted."
There should have been something dramatic. Lightning flashing (yes, I know, it was the wrong season), crashing drums, some pretty lights, something like that. There was not. Yet there was something... some instinctual knowledge that I had something new, that if I were to push just here and here within my own mind, then the world would know that this change was what was, and thus ever had been. Quickly as I could, with every bit of will I could muster, and no small amount of terror, I used this new strength against my erstwhile servant and imminent devourer.
