tablet and text looking for a final solution to the djinn problem.
That next morning the fishmonger rode up to the farmer’s home with his daughter in tow. Unsurprised, the farmer met him out in front. “It is the strangest thing,” said the fishmonger. “Last night my daughter came to me and with the voice of a dozen nightingales said, ‘Father, I love a man and I wish to marry him.’ And a voice so sweet cannot be denied, especially when she told me that she loved a man as well regarded and noble as you. So I come to you with dowry in hand asking if you would marry my daughter and make me the proudest father in all the land.”
The farmer smiled, nodded, and promised the fishmonger that he would love his daughter with all his heart. And so the two were quickly married and lived happily upon figs and fish for the remainder of their lives.
But the vizier was furious. After weeks of combing through scripture and scroll he still could not find a way to kill a djinn outright. He did however find two fragments of dark script that detailed two very important points. The first was that each djinn is only as old as memory and that they die when no one can remember their name. The second was a method of trapping them in a vessel where they could be stored and kept forever. Separate, these notions were dangerous to the djinn, but together they proved to be the path to their undoing.
At once the vizier commissioned the artisans of the kingdom to cast bottles and lamps constructed of the finest, carefully chosen materials. Then he ordered his riders to pay a visit to the fig farmer and his new bride. The riders returned by morning, bearing the freshly cut heads of the newlyweds. Commissioned then to ride in all directions, the riders sought out djinn wherever they could be found. Each rider was given a dozen bottles and lamps and was told they dared not return until each vessel was filled.
The vizier’s revenge was not swift. It was slow and deliberate. Word did not spread quickly enough and, within a year, ten thousand bottles returned filled with djinn. But not a one was the djinn he was looking for. Each bottle was stored in a vault that was then buried twenty feet beneath the sand. Robbed of both his prize and his bride, the vizier took solace in his hollow victory.
This victory was short lived, however, for the djinn were numerous—more numerous than ten thousand—and did not take the news of their imprisoned brethren without insult. While the magic of the bottles prevented the few remaining djinn from opening or even finding them, the riders who carried them were not so tight with their secrets—especially after they had run out of bottles. It took turning only a few of the riders inside out before their tongues loosened and the djinn were able to discern the villain behind these wicked oubliettes.
The vizier awoke from a night of bad dreams to find himself alone in a desolate wasteland, far from his kingdom. There he wandered for three days before the sun and sand drove him to near madness. Just before he succumbed completely, the djinn set wild dogs upon him, which tore him limb from limb to slake their own thirst with his blood. After that, his bloodline was forever cursed, with his family condemned to strangling their newborn children until not a single relation remained. Lastly, the djinn struck the vizier’s name from the record of time, some say banishing its syllables from the tongues of men altogether.
The djinn then laid waste to the entire kingdom, made barren all of the surrounding lands, and razed the sultan’s palace to dust. The selfish djinn, the cause of this swift and terrible war, joined the mass exodus and departed—morose, quiet, and heavy with shame. He was never heard from again.
CHAPTER FIVE
COLBY STEVENS’S BIG DAY
No manner of exhaustion can keep a child asleep much later than six a.m. on Christmas Day. Colby awoke at 4:35. Today he was promised anything he wanted. Anything in the world. And while it would be nice to say that Colby had pondered, even for a moment, the starving children in Africa, the plight of those ravaged by disease the world over, or even the homeless guy who slept off a twelve-pack of the cheap stuff on the corner behind the convenience store—he