Along the arcade Abdullah glimpsed moonlight on metal helmets and—worse still—golden lamplight on swords and crossbows. He did not wait to explain to these people why he had screamed. He flung himself flat on the carpet.

“Back to the booth!” he whispered to it. “Quickly! Please!”

This time the carpet obeyed, as quickly as it had the night before. It was up off the bank in an eye blink and then hurtling sideways across a forbiddingly high wall. Abdullah had just a glimpse of a large party of northern mercenaries milling around in the lamplit garden before he was speeding above the sleeping roofs and moonlit towers of Zanzib. He had barely time to reflect that Flower-in-the-Night’s father must be even richer than he had thought—few people could afford that many hired soldiers, and mercenaries from the north were the most expensive kind—before the carpet planed downward and brought him smoothly in through the curtains to the middle of his booth.

There he gave himself up to despair.

A djinn had stolen Flower-in-the-Night and the carpet had refused to follow. He knew that was not surprising. A djinn, as everyone in Zanzib knew, commanded enormous powers in the air and the earth. No doubt the djinn had, as a precaution, ordered everything in the garden to stay where it was while he carried Flower-in-the-Night away. It had probably not even noticed the carpet, or Abdullah on it, but the carpet’s lesser magic had been forced to give way to the djinn’s command. So the djinn had stolen away Flower-in-the-Night, whom Abdullah loved more than his own soul, just at the moment when she was about to run into his arms, and there seemed nothing he could do.

He wept.

After that he vowed to throw away all the money hidden in his clothes. It was useless to him now. But before he did, he gave himself over to grief again, noisy misery at first, in which he lamented out loud and beat his breast in the manner of Zanzib; then, as cocks crowed and people began moving about, he fell into silent despair. There was no point even in moving. Other people might bustle about and whistle and clank buckets, but Abdullah was no longer part of that life. He stayed crouching on the magic carpet, wishing he were dead.