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When the light began to wane in the afternoon, casting shadows of gray and violet across the stable yard below the tower where he worked, Reza would give himself over to shuddering waves of anxiety and anticipation. Each day, as evening approached, memory inevitably carried him back sixty years, to the arms of his wet nurse. The twilight hour is when the jinn grow restless, she had told him. She was Turkish, and never threw his bathwater out the dow without asking the pardon of the hidden folk who lived in the ground below. If she failed to warn them, the indignant creatures might curse her charge, afflicting him with blindness or the spotted disease.

When Reza was a student, and had not yet learned wisdom, he dismissed her fears as superstition.

Now he was an old man with failing teeth. As the sun flushed up, touching the dome of the shahs palace across the square, a familiar terror began to provoke his bowels. His apprentice loitered at the back of the workroom, picking over the remains of his masters lunch. Reza could feel the contemptuous look the pimpled youth leveled at his back as he stood in the dow, watching the progress of the dying sun.

Bring me the manuscript, said Reza, without turning. Set out my inkwell and my reed pens. Make everything ready.

Yes, master. The youths tone was surly. He was the third son of a minor noble, and had neither scholarly nor spiritual inclinations to speak of. Onceonly onceReza had allowed the to remain when the thing visited him, hoping his apprentice would see, and understand, and tell Reza he was not mad. He did not. When the creature arrived, congealing inside the chalkandash summoning circle Reza had drawn at the center of the workroom, the did not appear to notice. He stared at his master in blank irritation as the shadow in the circle unfolded itself and grew limbs, caricaturing the form of a man. When Reza addressed the apparition, the had laughed, scorn and disbelief mingling in his ringing voice.
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    • Why? Reza had asked the creature desperately. Why t you let him see you? In response, the thing had grown teeth: row after row of them, crowded together in a sickening grin. He chooses not to see, it said. Reza worried that the would report his masters clandestine activities to his father, who would then alert the orthodox functionaries at the palace, who in turn would have him imprisoned for sorcery. But his apprentice had said nothing, and continued to return day after day for his lessons. It was only the lethargy of his service and the contempt in his voice that told Reza he had lost the s respect. The ink has dried on the pages I wrote yesterday, Reza said when his apprentice returned with his pens and ink. Theyre ready for preservation. Have you mixed more varnish? The looked up at him, color draining from his face. I cant, he said, surliness evaporating. Please. Its too awful. I dont want to Very well, said Reza with a sigh. Ill do it myself. You can go. The bolted for the door. Reza sat down at his table, pulling a large stone bowl toward himself. The work would distract him until evening arrived. Into the bowl, he poured a portion of the precious mastic resin that had been simmering over a charcoal brazier since early morning. He added several drops of black oil from the seed of the nigella and stirred to keep the liquid from hardening. When he was satisfied with the consistency of the mixture, he gingerly lifted the linen veil from an unassuming metal pot sitting at one end of the work table.
    A scent filled the room: sharp, alarming, viscerally female. Reza thought of his wife, alive and blooming and big with the child that had died with her. This scent had permeated the linens of their bed before Reza ordered his servants to carry it away and burn it. For a mot, he felt lost. Forcing himself to be impassive, he separated what he needed from the viscous mess and, lifting it with metal tongs, dropped it unceremoniously into the cooling bowl of varnish. He counted out several minutes on his knuckles before looking in the bowl again. The varnish had turned as clear and glistening as honey.

    Reza carefully laid out the pages he had transcribed during the creatures last visit. He wrote in Arabic, not Persian, hoping that this precaution would prevent his work from being misused should it fall into the hands of the uneducated and uninitiated. The manuscript was thus a double translation: first into Persian from the voiceless language in which the creature spoke, which fell on Rezas ears like the night echoes of childhood, when sleep was preceded by that solitary, fearful journey between waking and dreaming. Then from Persian into Arabic, the language of Rezas education, as mathematical and efficient as the creatures speech was diffuse.

    The result was perplexing. The stories were there, rendered as well as Reza could manage, but something had been lost. When the creature spoke, Reza would drift into a kind of trance, watching strange shapes amplify themselves again and again, until they resembled mountains, coastlines, the pattern of frost on glass. In these mots he felt sure he had accomplished his desire, and the sum of knowledge was within his reach. But as soon as the stories were fixed on paper, they shifted. It was as if the characters themselvesthe princess, the nurse, the bird king, and all the resthad grown sly and slipped past Reza as he attempted to render them in human proportions.