A Whole New World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,25
The sudden receiving of absolute magical power didn’t seem to do anything to stabilize the sorcerer or quell his violent tendencies. He raised his arms again, brandishing his cobra-headed staff.
Jasmine and her father drew back.
“Let me, in my first act as sultan, prove my good faith!”
He cast an eye back at the genie. The genie, still looking a little shocked by the turn of events, distractedly wiggled his fingers.
The clouds cracked apart with lightning. It began to rain.
A…golden rain.
Small golden coins fell out of the sky and tinkled on rooftops and cobblestones.
There was a gasp from the crowd. Then people were diving for the money, holding their hands in the air to catch the coins, grinning. Jasmine turned her face away, repulsed by the show of greed.
When the initial rush was over, they finally began to cheer.
“Long live Jafar!”
Jafar visibly relaxed, finally getting something that he really wanted out of the day.
After a moment, he turned to the three standing behind him. He put a hand on the old sultan’s chest.
“There, you see?” he said with a sneer. “That is real power.”
And then he pushed the sultan over the balcony.
DEEP UNDER THE DESERT, Aladdin was digging.
Digging. Removing rocks. Pushing slippery piles of scree and sand aside. Digging again.
He had been doing it for two days.
A lesser man might have given up.
He was so thirsty his tongue was swollen and he couldn’t swallow. He was so hungry he could barely even sit up; most of his scrabbling was done while lying down. He was so tired that the difference between asleep and awake was becoming hard to distinguish.
The blackness around him was absolute except for the occasional red flicker of lava from far below. Time had ceased to have any meaning. Aladdin slept very little, afraid that if he did, he would never wake up.
But he didn’t give up hope. The same endless expectation of good things that had kept his mother struggling until she died was in his blood, as well.
He wasn’t so deep under the sands, right? And whether it was dormant or alive and moving, the giant stone tiger still kept its basic structure, right? So he was probably still in the “throat,” which was close to the “mouth,” which led to the surface. And the thing was so torn up and destroyed that there were probably holes all over its granite skin.…
Right?
Aladdin also had two more things besides endless optimism that most other people didn’t have.
One was a tiny monkey.
He wasn’t really that much help. But Abu kept Aladdin sane and gave him a reason to push on.
The other thing he had was a magic carpet, who—which?—was useful. It neatly carried piles of stones out of the way and occasionally even lent a tassel to working out a stuck rock. Aladdin curled up on the carpet when he rested, and he could have sworn the thing rocked him a little.
He also had his thoughts to keep his mind busy while he worked. Sometimes they turned to the crazy, evil old man and his attempt at murder. But Aladdin wasn’t one driven by revenge; he had seen that emotion use up and destroy others in the Quarter of the Street Rats. He just couldn’t figure out why, once the old man had the stupid trinket he wanted, he had felt it necessary to kill Aladdin. He had what he wanted and Aladdin couldn’t care less what happened to him and his dumb lamp. It wasn’t like he was going to try to take it from him. There was something else in play there, a mystery he would solve as soon as he was out of the cave.
But mostly Aladdin thought about Princess Jasmine. If he had never met her, he wouldn’t have been thrown into prison by the royal guards, he wouldn’t have fallen in with the crazy, evil old man, and he wouldn’t be there now, trying to dig himself out of a black, suffocating pit in the middle of the desert.
And still he wouldn’t have changed a thing.
He thought about her eyes when she was looking into his. He thought about her eyes when she had seen the beggar children. He had witnessed the single moment she began to comprehend the world he lived in. He replayed the graceful skill with which she handled her tiny silver dagger. He thought about her descending from the sky at the end of her pole vault like a warrior angel.
Thinking about all that made him forget that his fingers