The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) - S. A. Chakraborty Page 0,138

and shaped like an ornate fish with fluttering fins and a curved tail, and it had a series of boxy pictograms carved into one side. She pulled free a pin from her headscarf and turned the lock over to find the keyhole. Holding it close to her ear, she expertly picked it, and the bar swung open. “See? A lock. It’s just missing its key.”

Nahri triumphantly handed the ornamental lock back to Ali and leaned into her cushion, propping her feet up on a plump silk ottoman. She and her overqualified tutor were in one of the upper balconies of the royal library, the same place they’d been meeting every afternoon for the past few weeks. She took a sip of tea, admiring the intricate glasswork of the nearby window.

The impressive library had quickly become her favorite place in the palace. Even bigger than Ghassan’s throne room, the huge roofed-over courtyard was filled with bustling scholars and arguing students. On the balcony across from them, a Sahrayn instructor had conjured up smoke into an even larger map than the one Dara had made for her during their desert crossing. A miniature boat of spun glass floated in its sea. The instructor raised his hands and a gust of wind filled its silken sails, sending it racing along a chart marked by tiny burning embers as several students watched. In the alcove above him, an Agnivanshi scholar was teaching mathematics. With each snap of her fingers, a new number appeared scorched on the whitewashed wall before her, a veritable map of equations her pupils were diligently copying.

And then there were the books themselves. The shelves soared out of sight to meet the dizzyingly high ceiling; Ali—who seemed utterly delighted by her interest in the library—had told her that its vast inventory contained copies of just about every work ever written, both human and djinn. Apparently there was an entire class of djinn who spent their lives traveling from human library to human library, meticulously copying its works and sending them back to be archived in Daevabad.

The shelves were also crowded with glittering tools and instruments, murky preservation jars, and dusty artifacts. Ali warned her away from the majority; apparently small explosions were not uncommon. The djinn had a propensity for exploring the properties of fire in every form.

“A lock.” Ali’s words pulled her attention back. The prince sounded disappointed. Two library attendants flew through the air behind him on carpets the size of prayer rugs, retrieving books for the scholars below.

“Efl,” she corrected his Arabic. “Not qefl.”

He frowned, pulling over a piece of parchment from the stack they’d been using to practice letters. “But it is written like this.” He wrote out the word and pointed to its first letter. “Qaf, no?”

Nahri shrugged. “My people say efl.”

“Efl,” he repeated carefully. “Efl.”

“There. Now you sound like a proper Egyptian.” She smiled at Ali’s serious expression as he turned the lock over in his hands. “The djinn don’t use locks?”

“Not really. We find curses to be a better deterrent.”

Nahri made a face. “That sounds unpleasant.”

“But effective. After all . . .” He met her gaze, a slight challenge in his gray eyes. “A former maidservant just picked one rather easily.”

Nahri cursed herself for the slip. “I had a lot of cupboards to open. Cleaning supplies and such.”

Ali laughed, a warm sound she rarely heard that always took her a bit by surprise. “Are brooms so valuable among humans?”

She shrugged. “My mistress was stingy.”

He smiled, peering into the lock’s exposed keyhole. “I think I should like to learn to do this.”

“Pick a lock?” She laughed. “Are you planning a future as a criminal in the human world?”

“I like to keep my options open.”

Nahri snorted. “Then you’ll need to work on your accent. Your Arabic sounds like something spoken by scholars in the ancient courts of Baghdad.”

He took the jab in stride, returning it with a compliment. “I suppose I’m not making as much progress as you in our respective studies,” he confessed. “Your writing has truly come a long way. You should start thinking about what language you’d like to tackle next.”

“Divasti.” There was no question. “Then I can read the Nahid texts myself instead of listening to Nisreen drone on.”

Ali’s face fell. “I fear you’ll need another tutor for that. I barely speak it.”

“Truly?” When he nodded, she narrowed her eyes. “You told me once that you know five different languages . . . and yet you couldn’t find time to learn that