Forged

by Benedict Jacka

  Sonder was dressed as if he’d just come from the office, and his head was buried in a sheaf of papers. The combination of smart clothing and messy hair made him look like a programmer at a big tech company, or maybe a political aide. He hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him, but then I’d been through a lot more lately than he had.

  It was tempting to wait and see how long it would take for him to notice me, but I was on a clock. “Hi, Sonder.”

  Sonder jumped, scattering papers, and whirled. One hand started to come up, then he recognised me and froze.

  “Nice to see you too,” I said. “Okay, so I’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news—that slow-time field you’re thinking of using, or that stasis field? You wouldn’t get it off fast enough. Good news is I’m not here for a fight.”

  From looking at the futures, I could sense Sonder’s thoughts racing. Slowly they calmed down and the possibilities of a fight vanished. “How did you get in?” Sonder asked cautiously.

  “Your security sucks,” I said. “So, how are things with the Council? I imagine after what happened to Sal Sarque they must have a bunch of openings.”

  I saw Sonder flinch slightly at the reminder. “It’s . . . going well.”

  I sighed. “Oh, relax, Sonder. I’ve never lifted a finger against you in all the years we’ve known each other and I’ve got no intention of starting now. Not unless you try to arrest me or something equally stupid.”

  Sonder grimaced slightly. “Not much chance of that.” He sat down, a little of the tension going out of him. “So are you . . . ah . . .”

  “Doing well as an outlaw?” I finished. “Can’t complain.”

  “Um. Good.”

  I looked at Sonder.

  “I mean, not good,” he said hastily. “It’s good that, well . . .”

  “Okay, you know what, let’s skip the small talk,” I said. “I’d like to quiz you about a research subject.”

  “Which subject?”

  “Project Catalyst.”

  Sonder paused for just a second too long. “What?”

  “After Morden did his raid on the Vault two years ago, the Council issued an order to investigate the imbued items that were stolen. You were one of the project leads and did most of the item reports, which I was reading the same day you delivered them, so can you not play dumb, please?”

  “You know all this was top secret,” Sonder said.

  “Sonder, let me explain something to you,” I said. “Right now, there is a team of Council Keepers hunting me. The longer I stay in one place, the better the chances that they’ll track me there. When they do, there will be a fight. Once the dust settles, any survivors will be in an extremely bad mood, and when they discover that you and I were in this room, they will have questions. These questions will be uncomfortable and potentially highly embarrassing for both you and any allies you happen to have on the Council. So I would suggest that it is very much in your interest not to dick me around.”

  “Okay, okay,” Sonder said hurriedly. “I get what you’re saying, but Project Catalyst was huge. You can’t expect me to remember all of the details.”

  “I don’t need to know about all the items, just one. Suleiman’s Ring.”

  “Well, I can remember that, but . . . look, there was a reason that thing ended up in the Vault. No one’s going to go running experiments on a ring with a jinn.”

  “I know, I read your report. I’m not interested in what the ring can do. I want to know about the jinn inside it. Specifically, its history.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s easy.” Sonder seemed to relax a little bit. These days Sonder was a politician, but he’d started his career as a historian, and this was his home ground. “It’s the marid sultan. It’s just referred to as the sultan in the records, because it was unnamed . . . you know about that?”

  I shook my head.

  “It was what they did with all the marids. Apparently the binding ritual for the jinn used their true names. They wanted to stop them from breaking free, so after they finished, they made sure that the marids’ names would be lost permanently . . .”

  I nodded, listening with half an ear while I monitored the futures. The Keeper team hunting me was narrowing down my location. I could stall them with the fateweaver, but not for long.

  “. . . and that was why they think it was in that bubble realm,” Sonder said. “After what happened to the last mage who tried to use it, well . . .”

  “Okay, you don’t know the marid’s name,” I said. “Is there anything you do know about it? History, personality, goals?”

  “Its goals were the defeat of the Council, I think,” Sonder said. “The war went on a very long time. By the end the jinn had been fighting a losing battle for years.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Well, most of the historical data we have from back then are official Council records,” Sonder said. “They’re focused on the progress of the war and Council resolutions. As far as the individual marids go, there are some tactical analyses, but . . .”

  “Tactical analyses?”

  “The sultan was served by four ifrit generals,” Sonder said. “They each had different types of elemental control, sounded a lot like elemental mages, actually. Apparently they had some way of amplifying the sultan’s power. It was only after the Council launched a strike specifically targeting them that they were able to defeat the sultan afterwards.”

  “So did they bind them into items too?”

  Sonder shook his head. “No, they discussed that but rejected it. Too many worries that anyone who got hold of one of the generals could use it to free the sultan. They were banished instead.”

  “They didn’t just kill them?”

  “Well, they couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Sonder looked at me in surprise. “Jinn can’t be killed. You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s because they’re partly divine.” Sonder settled back into his chair; he was in his element now. “I mean, ‘divine’ is the wrong word, there’s nothing sacred about them, but the people who wrote about them back then were a lot less rational about these things. A better model is that jinn exist in two different states. They have a physical form that exists inside space-time, and a nonphysical form that exists outside it. That was how the binding ritual could work. It just remapped their nonphysical state from one body to another.”

  I frowned as I thought about that. “It was that easy?”

  “Well, it took a lot of research to develop.”

  “I didn’t mean easy to do. What effect did it have on the jinn?”

  “Well, they were still around. And they could still grant wishes.”

  “I mean in terms of what it was like for them.”

  “Oh.” Sonder shrugged. “I don’t think anybody knows.”

  Arachne had told me that the binding process had harmed the jinn, filling them with hatred or driving them to madness. She hadn’t explained why. “You said the jinn’s nonphysical states existed outside space-time,” I said. “So it was their physical forms that tethered them to our conception of time and space. Right?”

  “Well, yes, in layman’s terms.”

  “So switching their physical forms . . . would that mean that while they were in between the two, their consciousness wouldn’t have a temporal anchor? So they wouldn’t experience time in the same way as us at all?”

  “Probably,” Sonder said. “I mean, you’re talking about the infinity point hypothesis, right?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, from Schulte?”

  The futures shifted, and I paused to look at the change. The Keeper team hunting me had managed to get a first-stage fix on my signature. They’d have to do a second pass to narrow down my location, but just gating wouldn’t be enough to throw them off
anymore. I had maybe five or six minutes.

  “Alex?”

  “Sorry. I’m not very familiar with his work.”

  “Well, you know how all of those attempts for mages to transfer their consciousness into external housings never seem to work, right?” Sonder said. “And it’s not just here, pretty much every Light Council across the globe has a history of trying it. Golems, simulacra, clones, they never seem to take. Either the mind doesn’t jump, or they come out insane. Anyway, Schulte’s hypothesis was that it’s our physical body that allows our consciousness to experience time in a sequential way. Without a physical tether, our consciousness still exists, but it doesn’t occupy any position in space-time. The problem with all of those transference rituals was that no matter how they were designed, there was an infinitesimally small period during the jump where the transferring consciousness wasn’t tethered to their new body or their old body. Everyone else would perceive that moment as only a tiny fraction of a second, but without an anchor, the transferring consciousness could theoretically experience it as any length of time.”

  A chill went through me. “You mean they could experience something that felt like thousands of years? With no sensory input or feedback?”

  Sonder nodded. “Hence the insanity. That’s the theory anyway. It’s why nobody tries transferring their mind into a golem anymore.”

  “So the same thing could have happened to those jinn.”

  “Well, it would explain why they were so uncooperative.”

  I was thinking about what the jinn in the monkey’s paw had said. Between body and seal, we were outside. A blink of an eye and a thousand years. What would it be like, to be shut out from the world in total sensory deprivation for a thousand years? Jinn wouldn’t experience it the same way as humans, but it couldn’t be good.

  How would you survive something like that? You could do mental exercises, training your magical abilities in the way I’d trained in those long months when I was a prisoner in Richard’s mansion. Or you could focus on something, some goal or ideal, something greater than yourself to give you something to cling to during the endless years. The marid within the monkey’s paw had chosen the binding law of the contract. The sultan marid . . . what would it have chosen?

  At the time of its binding, it had been leading its species in a war against mages. That would have been its goal.

  Eternal war. I shivered.

  “What is it?” Sonder asked. “You keep spacing out.”

  “Little distracted. Sorry.” I rose to my feet, checking the futures. Only a minute or so left. “Sonder? One last thing. The jinn that weren’t bound into items. Can they still be summoned?”

  Sonder nodded. “By the higher-order jinn, yes. That’s how jinn-possession subjects can pull off summoning rituals so easily.”

  “So could the sultan resummon any other jinn of lesser rank than him? Including those ifrit?”

  “I hope not.” Sonder looked worried. “It’s bad enough dealing with one of them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The futures clicked. Somewhere in a Council facility, the Keepers hunting me had just learned my exact location. “Well, time to go. Thanks for the help.”

  Sonder tensed, probably wondering what I was going to do. I gave him a nod and walked out.

  I shut the door of the flat behind me and started down the stairs. Mentally, I was cataloguing futures, calculating the Keeper team’s next move. Right now, they’d be cross-referencing my location with GPS data and their own records and learning that I was at Sonder’s flat. Next, they’d ping Sonder’s locator and confirm that he was there as well. From that point they had two choices. They could decide that Sonder was now an additional suspect and needed to be brought in. In that case, they’d call in more reinforcements, deploy teams to surround the area, get ready to move in with maximum force.

  The other possibility was that they’d decide that Sonder was innocent and that I was an intruder, in which case the first thing they’d do would be to contact him directly. When he told them that I’d just left, they’d be faced with a dilemma. They could pull the trigger, gate in, and scramble to try to catch me before I got away, but they’d have little chance of catching me and they knew it. That just left them with one last option for tracking me before I got out of range . . .

  From above me, I heard Sonder’s door, followed by the sound of feet hurriedly descending the stairs.

  I sighed inwardly. They could get Sonder to slow me down. Sometimes knowing the future isn’t much fun.

  Sonder came racing around the last flight of steps and caught himself as he saw me standing at the bottom. “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “Uh . . . ,” Sonder said.

  I looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  Sonder had just started to open his mouth to speak when there was a shift in the futures and he paused, the movement so slight that you wouldn’t have noticed unless you were watching for it. It wasn’t a long pause. Just long enough for someone speaking into his ear over a concealed link to suggest a cover story. “Don’t use the front door,” Sonder said. “The Council are monitoring it.”

  “I have to go out somewhere.”

  “You can go through the courtyard.” He hesitated for just an instant. “There’s a back way. I’ll show you.”

  I looked up at Sonder. He shifted uncomfortably, and I felt a flash of disappointment. It wasn’t the fact that Sonder had gone along with the Keepers—I’d always known his loyalty was to the Council. It was that he’d done it so damn fast. “Okay, but hurry up.”

  Sonder led me the other way along an internal corridor, where a pair of double doors led outside. Or not exactly outside; high walls rose up all around us. Sonder had called it a “courtyard,” but it was more of an internal park, with flats rising up in a rectangle on four sides, and a neatly tended stretch of grass and trees criss-crossed by stone paths. It was a gated community and looked very exclusive and cosy. “So how’s the war been going?” I asked.

  “Pretty well.”

  “You mean apart from Sal Sarque and his entire retinue getting killed?”

  “Drakh took losses too,” Sonder said. “And we destroyed their base in that shadow realm they were using to launch attacks.”

  Sonder sounded distracted, as you’d expect from someone trying to follow two conversations at once. “Everyone seems to think you’re losing,” I told him.

  “We’re not losing,” Sonder said quickly. “The war’s in a stalemate due to . . .”

  I listened with half an ear. The Keeper team were getting ready to gate in at multiple locations. Multiple simultaneous locations—how were they managing that? There should be too much variation in the gate timings for—ah. They had a space mage. In fact, it was someone I’d met a while ago. Her name was Symmaris, and she’d provided the transport for a Keeper hit team who’d burned down my old shop. They were planning to have her open several gates at once and surround me.

  “. . . which is why they’re making a mistake,” Sonder finished.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Sonder was leading me diagonally across the courtyard. The Keepers were planning to launch their attack once I got out into the street, but they were still setting it up, and if I forced them to move early they’d have to go with their emergency plan, which was to gate right into the courtyard. I changed my focus to look at Sonder. They were probably talking to him through an earpiece—yup, earpiece communicator. I carry a dispel focus that looks like a long silver needle. Without breaking stride, I slid it out of my pocket, brought it up to just behind and to one side of Sonder’s ear, and discharged it in the air.

  There was a faint, tinny shriek as the communicator overloaded, and Sonder yelped, putting a hand to his head. He backed away from me, eyes flicking down to my hand and up again. “What are you . . . ?”

  “Shh,” I said, returning the focus to my pocket and watching
the futures intently. They were swirling as the Keepers tried to figure out what to do. I pushed delicately with the fateweaver. Not too hard, we don’t want to tip them off . . . there. I turned around and started walking back across the courtyard.

  “What are you doing?” Sonder called.

  “I’m going this way.”

  “The way out’s—”

  “No, I’ve got a good feeling about this way.”

  The futures flickered briefly as Sonder considered his options. I kept an eye on them while I paid most of my attention to the futures of the Keeper team. Let’s see, visual angle is there, firing angle is there. I stopped, changed direction, walked ten paces, and stopped.

  Sonder came up behind me cautiously. “Um . . . what are you doing?”

  “Do you know what’s special about this spot?” I asked Sonder.

  “. . . No?”

  I pointed at the pathway ahead, where it curved towards the doorway that we’d come out of. “That point is midway between where I was when you met me at the foot of the stairs, and where I was when we turned around. If you were searching for someone you suspected of doubling back, it’s where you’d start. Of course, it’s not very good from a tactical perspective, because anyone could come up behind you.” I turned and pointed to the left, where a grassy bed near the wall of the flats was lined with flowers. “If you wanted a good tactical position, you’d take that spot, right in front of the flowerbed. It’s at the centre of the wall so it gives you a view straight down the courtyard, and it’s between the windows of the ground-floor flat, so your back isn’t exposed. If you were a Keeper and you had to pick a landing spot, that’s where you’d go.”

  Sonder looked confused and alarmed at the same time. The mention of Keepers must have clued him in that something was wrong, but he was still two steps behind. “. . . Okay.”

  The futures had settled, the Keeper leader in charge of the team had given his orders, and Symmaris was forming her gateway. Space mages are very efficient at gateways. “But that’s not where I’m standing. What’s special about this spot?”