Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

the scarecrow

and slandered the magical liquid. It was said that she took great delight in vilifying it and spat in disgust whenever her girlfriends mentioned it. The sorceress’s patience with her neighbor was exhausted, and she decided to teach the fool a lesson that only a practitioner of sorcery can deliver. She wandered in the northern badlands by night and conversed with the heaven’s stars. Lovers tarrying in the wastelands heard her loud debate with jinn demons but did not fathom the reason for the dispute till some days later when ischuria afflicted her wretched neighbor, and this human liquid was retained by her haughty body. The herbalist drewmany herbs from his satchel and gave her lots of liquids to drink, but her urine retention persisted. So the woman was burning with

fever and began to struggle with bouts of insanity. Finally the herbalist admitted he couldnot cureher—as every desert apothecary does when he realizes that a condition’s etiology is mysterious. He told the woman that herbalists were created to treat physical ills the wasteland spawns, but that wasteland inhabitants would be obliged to search for a cure for Spirit World illnesses from the masters of the Spirit World. Then the arrogant neighbor woman was forced to descend from her high horse a second time; she summoned the sorceress. The sorceress entered her neighbor ’s tent and was surprised to find there— instead of her neighbor—a specter ...a shriveled, pale, unkempt female jinni, whose large, protruding eyeballs glowed with anxiety, pain,

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