The Waters of Eternity by Howard Andrew Jones

Dabir said. He bent down by the efreet’s head and lifted it up. He examined it for a moment, turning it this way and that, and then dropped it over his own. Instantly he was transformed into a creature of evil, but I knew then that the head was only a mask. He removed it.
    “It is merely a man in a costume,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you already know that?”
    “I knew that it was not an efreet,” Dabir said. “Efreet are notoriously difficult to control. An efreet would not patiently leave messages, or steal monkeys. At best it would have dismembered half the household as a warning.”
    Dabir rolled the costumed man over and we stared down at a pockmarked face with a shabby black and gray beard.
    “Who is he?” I asked.
    “A lackey, I think. Sometimes I wish you were less lethal, Asim.”
    “You might have mentioned you wanted him alive,” I said.
    “I thought you would know.”
    “I thought it was an efreet,” I pointed out.
    He stared down at the body a moment longer. “The mastermind behind this scheme still awaits this one’s return. I do not plan to disappoint him.”

III
     
    The metal ladder inside the pillar was old. My boots clanged against the rusting metal as I descended, and I knew then what had caused the noise that had so unnerved me. A lantern sat on the old stone at its foot, near a coil of rope and some rotted timber.
    I picked up the lantern and shined it into the gloom while Dabir descended, still clutching the efreet head. Moisture saturated the air. We stood in a small stone chamber, and worn stairs stretched farther down, out under the wall and toward the Tigris. From somewhere in the darkness ahead came the steady plunk of dripping water.
    Dabir put his hand on a rusted iron wheel set in the wall beside the ladder. “This must turn the fountain on and off.”
    “How did you know,” I whispered, “that the efreet would come from the fountain?”
    “I saw the pattern of the door in its side,” Dabir said, as though it were obvious.
    I did not wish to be distracted by another of his “looking but not seeing” discussions, so said nothing.
    We descended some twenty broad steps and found ourselves in a square tunnel, supported by sagging, rotting timbers. Moisture beaded on the walls, and here and there water dripped from the ceiling into pools on the pitted stone floor.
    “We are beneath the river,” Dabir said quietly. Even so, his voice echoed. We said not another word as we walked along what must have been an escape tunnel crafted by the Persians who’d originally built Mukhtar’s ancient home.
    At long last the lantern light showed ascending stairs, and Dabir bid me hand him my sword—which I did only reluctantly, because the man I impersonated did not carry one—and put the mask over my face. Like the efreet costume I’d donned, it reeked of sweat and dead skins. It had been designed so that one could see by looking out two slits cut into the lion’s forehead, but my peripheral vision was middling. I had cut the feet from the costume, for I did not want my movements hindered.
    Lantern in one hand, the silk-wrapped medallion in another, I trudged up the stairs. These climbed higher than those on the other side of the river, and curved gradually south. After some fifty steps I saw light ahead, and heard the chattering of a monkey. As I turned the bend I beheld a small cavern beyond an archway at the top of the stairs. A figure backlit by another lantern paced within it, and he stopped to stare at me as I neared.
    “Do you have it?” he asked. His voice was crisp, commanding.
    I lifted the medallion in my palm, snugly wrapped in silk, and the man’s eyes lit greedily.
    He was clearly a Persian—he had light skin, and his handsome face was adorned only with a short beard. His head was bare, but the rest of his clothing was finely wrought. The scent of his perfumes reached me even before I closed on him.
    “Excellent,” he said. “Was there trouble from the new