she could tell, the diamond-inlaid crowns were no longer changing in luminosity, however subtly.
“Let’s go,” she said.
They left on a single carpet—Kashkari’s skills were a better match for the close confines of an urban district. Iolanthe held on to him from behind and kept her gaze upward, but she couldn’t see anything overhead, other than a narrow alley of dark sky, between the nearly kissing top stories of the houses to either side.
The air smelled of spent coal, bread, and a faint undernote of donkey droppings. The night was becoming cooler, a breeze from the sea pushing out the residual heat from the day. Kashkari steered carefully, inching them forward.
A movement caught in the corner of her eye. But when she looked to the side, she didn’t see anything. What was it? A reflection on a still-open window, which meant the object was . . .
“Go! Fast as you can,” she hissed.
The thing behind them was a miniature armored chariot, a pod scarcely bigger than the desk in her room at Mrs. Dawlish’s and almost the exact same shadowy color as the night. A pair of claws, attached to long cables, shot out from the pod’s snout, aimed directly at her.
The carpet accelerated with a leap and took a sharp right turn tilted almost perpendicular to the street—only to careen headlong into the embrace of another pair of big claws.
Kashkari grunted and steered the carpet even lower, flattening it out completely. They passed under the incoming pod with scarcely an inch to spare above their heads.
Iolanthe sent a bolt of lightning toward the sky—their location had already been discovered, might as well find out what exactly loomed overhead. A gossamer net shimmered briefly, a thin, beautifully latticed web that stretched as far as she could see.
Fortune shield her. Had they covered all of Cairo?
Ahead three more vehicles blocked the way. Two pursued them from behind, and the way up was sealed.
She threw a barrage of opening spells at the nearest house. Kashkari banked a stomach-lurching turn. They shot past the front door into a dark, narrow passageway and saw the stairs just in time to pull up the carpet. At the top of the stair landing, Kashkari made her squeal by turning the carpet completely sideways. They fitted through a slender window—and barely avoided becoming caught in a tangle of laundry lines outside.
A half-wet sleeve—or was it a trouser leg?—slapped her on the shoulder as they dipped into an alley no wider than her arm span.
“What if they have sealed off the entire city?” Fear soaked her question. What if all they managed, by evading the armored pods, was to run into that lacy, bird-killing web somewhere down the road?
More laundry. Was that a donkey they avoided? Another pod barreled toward them. Kashkari jerked the carpet into a door Iolanthe opened for him. Strange odors assailed her nostrils—had they plowed into a gathering of hashish smokers? The faces that turned toward them, from low divans all around the walls, wore expressions of vague surprise rather than outright astonishment.
Then they were out another door into a walled garden. Kashkari kept the carpet as low as possible as they went over the walls—she could feel the jagged bits of glass embedded at the top of the wall scraping the bottom of the carpet. Thank goodness they were on a battle carpet and it was thick.
“Do you dare go back to Eton?” came Kashkari’s question, between a sudden dip and another tight turn.
A pod dropped down from nowhere. Its claws hurtled toward Iolanthe with terrifying speed. She yelled as she sent the water of a nearby well toward the claws—as ice, freezing them so that they could not close around her person.
“Just get us out of here!”
More twisting, ribbon-narrow alleys, more humble houses flown right through. The streets became wider, straighter, illuminated by gas lamps; the houses to either side sprouted balconies and elegant latticework windows and wouldn’t have looked out of place along a major boulevard in Paris.
Kashkari seem to know the neighborhood well: she could hear the bustle and crowd on the next street, but the one down which they charged was entirely empty of pedestrians, its residents either eating dinner genteelly inside or having gone to the busy thoroughfare for their evening entertainment.
“See that building? That’s the opera house. Don’t think the season has quite started yet, so it should be empty. Open all the windows and doors as you did before. Do you have anything that can look somewhat