COPYRIGHT 1995,
MARY MANNON REEVES.
A GAME OF DJINN.....PART II
There is a reason for three wishes. To get something you want, but don't need; the get something you need, but don't want; and to restore your life as it was, hopefully with a lesson learned.
To my surprise, M'laar's spell worked and Anjoree shuddered with her brief freedom. If time had been frozen before, it was petrified now, wating for her to make her third wish. Phrasing is so important....
"I wish..." her voice whispered along the piles of dusty gold,"I wish that we who have been kept here will be set free with our health and our wealth intact."
Good girl.
The lightstorm burst into a swirling frenzy about my head an arms. Anjoree's lover stretched and yawned and reached for his playmate as though his loins had been percolating for the ages. She rolled away and threw the lamp back at him, a puny sort of substiture for sex in his eyes. Not to mention useless.
"Now for my last tow wishes...." Hamar held his own jug up, confronting my brother Djinn. One colossal eyebrow rose, amusement hidden behind the smoke.
"Wait a minute! Wait-a-minute!" Anjorree grasped her savior's sleeve before he could utter something foolish.
"You have to be very careful about these things," I heard her coo as she led him from the cave. "It's all in the phrasing..."
M'laar lingered, like heat scar left in the night by a passing torch.
"Very clever, Sister," he chuckled. "She doesn't even realize what she's done."
"Nor does he." I nodded at the deserted Ramaal below me, cradling the lamp with a greedy gleam in his eye.
"Was it worth the wait?" M'laar asked.
"A hundred years in a moldy cave in exchange for freedom? You've spent three times that long in your jug and you aren't free yet. You tell me."
I kept the boy beglamoured long enough to let the others get away. Knowingly or not, Anjoree had given a Djinn the one thing a Djinn can't give herself. Freedom. I owed her something for that.
As for th boy, well, I didn't leave him hungry or even damned. As a last gesture of goodwill, I changed the sausagfes into lamb.
THE END
