Your Wish Is His Command by Judi Fennell Page B

djinn as they were to mortals. Kal
braced himself. His time of reckoning was at hand.
    “ Stand back, dog!”
    Kal smiled and stepped to the back of the
cell. As if insults hurt him after what he’d endured. The jailer
needed to come up with a new repertoire, but Kal wasn’t about to
tell him that. Let the poor misguided eunuch think he had something
over Kal—other than that damn poker, that was.
    Six of the guards trooped in and gripped him
by the armpits, yanking a shudra over his restraints. Now that hurt. But Kal didn’t let them see his pain. No need to
fire their bloodlust now. The gods knew, it’d be fired enough when
he refused to open his mouth. Mostly he did that to protect the
vial, but when he’d realize that silence made Faruq angrier… well,
hey, he had to get what he could out of the situation and saying
nothing worked better than saying something.
    Until he hadn’t.
    “ Your luck has finally run out,”
another said with a sneer. “The vizier is putting you on trial
before the High Master.”
    The High Master. They were taking him into the
court of the man he’d worked so diligently to serve—until Faruq had
stolen it all from him. Maybe his luck was finally starting to turn .
    This was it. He was finally going to be free.
After two hundred years of captivity at the hands—and sadistic
imagination—of his old nemesis, Kal was finally going to outsmart
Faruq and use Iman’s vial to lose himself in the vast desert
surrounding Al-Jannah, the capital of the djinn world.
    They dragged him from the tiny cell and
paraded him through the corridors of the High Master’s palace like
the dog they’d called him, but Kal kept his head held high, his
anger in check, and the all-important vial of potion tucked
securely beneath his tongue.
    “ Move along, traitor,” another of
the eunuch guards taunted, poking him in the back with the recently
sharpened point of his scimitar.
    Kind of hard to get mad at a eunuch really.
The most Kal could muster for him was pity because, personally,
he’d rather be dead than sentenced to that hell on
earth.
    The corridor opened into the main hall where a
serving girl was pouring ambrosia into a set of glasses beside the
High Master’s throne. Before it, in the middle of the room, stood a
dais three times the size of Kal’s cell and draped in blue silk
shot through with gold.
    The irony wasn’t lost on him as he glanced
down at the blue shudra he’d been given to wear. Everyone
knew the High Master favored blue; it was the gold that was ironic;
it matched the cuffs Kal had figured out how to remove, which was
his crime and the reason he was here.
    Two other prisoners were already seated on the
dais, with cushions for four more. Kal wondered what their
transgressions were. Surely none of them could compete with the
horror he’d committed; no djinn had ever removed the cuffs of
Servitude, a badge of honor among those in The Service.
    Kal ran his tongue over the vial. Once he put
the plan in motion he’d have to return to Iman’s to find his
lantern. As long as it lay unclaimed, he could belong to no man.
But the minute someone picked it up, he was back in The Service and
he hadn’t gone through all of this to find himself right back where
he’d started, not without the hope of the promotion that had
started all of this. The promotion Faruq had stolen.
    “ Move along.” The eunuch prodded
him again.
    Kal stopped and spun around. He’d had enough
of being sword practice, of being at Faruq’s mercy, of having all
his hard work and dreams tossed aside as if his life were
meaningless. He was just itching for a fight. “Go ahead, walad . Stab me. Let’s see if you’ve got the balls to do
it.”
    A stricken look crossed the eunuch’s face as
Kal realized what he’d said. The guy didn’t have the balls,
actually.
    The big, muscular guard behind the first one
growled. “Get up the steps now, traitor, or you won’t
either.”
    Newly snipped, probably. And not