This sultan so oppressed his people that those who could, fled the city, leaving behind only the poor and wretched, who knew that they would be no more welcome elsewhere. And unrest did come, for it happened that, many years after al-Tir al-Abtan completed the construction of his vast edifice, a foolish and evil man ascended the throne as Sultan of Tahrir, one Selim ibn Jafar. As tales grow in the telling, it was soon rumored that Tir used djinni and afrits as his household slaves, and his palace was shunned as an unholy and fearsome place, even when unrest came upon the city. It was said, also, that other creatures, equally terrible, patrolled the gardens. Even when the magician himself was away about the world, the palace was said to be guarded by a demon, or ghoul, that none saw but all feared.
Thus did the wizard guard his privacy, and for fully a century his palace remained inviolate, while he grew in necromantic prowess, and those about him lived and died and in all those years that passed without touching his citadel, no man or woman other than al-Tir al-Abtan saw the inside of the marble walls that separated the palace grounds from the remainder of the city. Certainly, when he chose to enter or leave, a gate appeared, but no one else could ever find it again afterward, or remember just where it had been. Whether the gate was concealed somehow, or moved about, or did not actually exist at all was a matter of much debate among the people of Tahrir. The Most Profound Tir made it impossible for any save himself to find a gate in the outer wall of his residence. He did not care directly to refuse the lords of the earth admission to his palace, for that would mean constant harassment by those seeking exceptions or an end to the ban but instead, he put the palace where no self-respecting nobleman would dare approach it, and where those who did approach it could be freely dealt with. The Most Profound Tir, the great magician of the age, had raised his palace here to avoid the petty intrigues of lesser wizards, and the maddening importunities of nobles and kings upon his time and talent. To reach it, a determined traveler would find himself required to pass through alleys that were little more than tunnels through crumbling piles of brick, and down streets that were no more than mud-filled gaps between one decrepit tenement and the next. The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan stood, of the wizard's choice, in the poorest quarter of Tahrir. This is a tale of the wizard al-Tir al-Abtan, when he dwelt in the ancient city of Tahrir, on the shore of the southern sea. Lawrence Watt-Evans: The Palace of al-Tir al-Abtan