At the same moment the tiny yellow Princess of Tsapfan gave Morgan a shrewd nip, just in the right place. Morgan had been asleep in her tiny arms, dreaming he was a kitten again. He woke with a jump and found he was still a helpless baby. His fury knew no bounds. He opened his mouth, and he roared. His feet pedaled with anger. His hands pumped. And his roars were so lusty that had it been a competition between himself and Valeria, Morgan might have won. As it was, the noise was unspeakable. The echoes in the hall picked it up, doubled the screams, and rolled it all back at the throne.

“Echo at those djinns,” Sophie was saying in her conversational magical way. “Don’t just double it. Treble it.”

The hall was a madhouse. Both djinns clapped their hands over their pointed ears. Dalzel hooted, “Stop it! Stop them! Where did that baby come from?”

To which Hasruel howled, “Women have babies, fool of a djinn! What did you expect?”

“I WANT MY DOGGY BACK!” stated Valeria, beating the seat of the throne with her fists.

Dalzel’s trumpet voice fought to be heard. “Give her a doggy, Hasruel, or I’ll kill you!”

At this stage in Abdullah’s plans he had confidently expected—if he had not been killed by then—to be turned into a dog. It was what he had been leading up to. This, he had calculated, would also have released Jamal’s dog. He had counted on the sight of not one dog but two, dashing from beneath the Paragon’s petticoat, to add to the confusion. But Hasruel was as distracted by the screams, and the triple echoes of screams, as his brother was. He turned this way and that, clutching his ears and yelling with pain, the picture of a djinn at his wits’ end. Finally he folded his great wings and became a dog himself.

He was a very huge dog, something between a donkey and a bulldog, brown and gray in patches, with a golden ring in his snub nose. This huge dog put its gigantic forepaws on the arm of the throne and stretched an enormous slavering tongue out toward Valeria’s face. Hasruel was trying to seem friendly. But at the sight of something so big and so ugly, Valeria, not unnaturally, screamed harder than ever. The noise frightened Morgan. He screamed harder, too.

Abdullah had a moment when he was quite at a loss what to do, and then another moment when he was sure no one would hear him shout. “Soldier!” he roared. “Hold Hasruel! Someone hold Dalzel!”