“Even if I could move this. If I ever went out, the British would see this skeleton, and they’d kill us probably.”
“I’ll cover your hands and feet with cloth, we’ll say your limbs are scarred if anyone ever asks. We’ll figure it out.”
“I…”
“No,” Rani’s voice was suddenly hard. “No more excuses. I’ve seen you pick up things with your mind. This harness is a thing. Your arms and legs are in it. You’re going to pick them up, and pick up your arms and legs.”
Rani held out her hands. “Take my hands,” she said. And almost without thinking, Bina did, her exoskeletal fingers grasping at Rani’s flesh. Rani held her hands, winced, and pulled her up.
Bina heard the metal joints around her thin legs creak, the straps tighten with new movement like unused muscles, and she felt the pieces of metal in the harness around her float like dust in sunlight, drifting as her mind vanished into a profound numbness, dominated only by the image of a child in a padded chamber, sitting calmly in the centre of her skull. She felt the pieces of metal float and lift her legs and arms, which filled with the sparkling tingle of blood moving fresh through their weakened vessels.
She was standing. By herself. Held up by metal, metal held adrift by a little child in her head. The leather soles under her exoskeletal feet squeaked as she nearly fell down in shock, but corrected herself.
Rani watched, her mouth open, arms held out to grab her sister if she fell.
Bina was shivering violently.
“My little Begum,” Rani said, her voice trembling ever so. “Come forward.”
“I can’t move,” Bina said, voice thick.
“Why?”
“I…I’m scared,” she said.
“My Begum. I know. I know. But I’m here. I won’t let you fall. Just look, look at your hands. Look what they’re doing.”
Bina looked at her hands, at the metal fingers flexing and unflexing by her side, their parts moving and clicking, joints bending, blessing her deformed fingers with intricate movement. “Oh, god,” Bina said. The metal fingers seized, stopped their clicking.
“Don’t,” Rani said. “You’re thinking too much. You were moving them without even thinking of it.”
“Okay,” Bina whispered.
“Bina. You’re standing. You haven’t done that in years. Don’t be afraid.” Bina thought of the years and years of being curled in her sister’s powerful arms, letting the sun warm her face on their morning walks by the river.
“I’ll fall if I move,” Bina said.
“I’m here if you do.”
Rani took off her necklace and held it out. “Use your fingers. Take it.”
Her hand shook as she raised it. She watched the little gears spin in the joints, the fingers bending to grasp the necklace. She held it in between her metal fingers. “Wear it,” Rani said. Her arms floated up, her hands passing her head, and she felt the necklace around her neck. It was a string tied to a featureless coin their father had hammered, to practice telekinesis with their mother, passing it between their hands through the air. Bina didn’t remember this herself. The coin hung against her chest.
“That’s it. You’re doing better than I could have ever hoped.”
Bina nodded. She closed her eyes, and pennants unfurled from her scalp in the sunlight flashing off her great ivory-plated shoulders. She breathed in deep, felt the giant bellows in her, the furnaces in her torso flare with life. Felt the entire engine of her machinery close around the twin tombs deep inside her, protecting them. She breathed out, steam rushing from the ports on her head and back, gushing ribbons of cloud into the pale sky. Her hands were huge, big enough to pick up cattle, elephants. Underneath her was their entire slum, sprawled across the banks of the Hooghly, in the distance the white palatial city of the British, of Calcutta, airships hovering like balloons above it, tethered to the land with strings she could snap with her fingers. An army of British soldiers couldn’t stop her. They’d flee, or be crushed, their bullets glancing harmlessly off her towering body.
“We’ll travel?” Bina asked, her voice breaking.
“We will. We’ll go to Delhi. We’ll find a way to get you new medicine. We’ll see the Taj Mahal. I promise.”
Bina felt dizzy, her own height strange to her. She heard her metal fingers clicking again, moving again. Flexing. Unflexing. She thought of the little Begum pilot in the padded chamber in her skull, her resolve, looking out at the world through the windows of a giant’s eyes. This little Begum didn’t have an Emperor for a father, and a dead Empress for a mother. In fact, she was no Begum, just a girl. This little girl had a father and mother who were metal-workers, who were shot by the British when it was discovered they were both telekinetic. This little girl had a sister with whom she was sent to be ‘civilized’ in an imperial boarding house. This little girl had a sister who kept them both alive over years on the streets, found them refuge working metal like their parents had, in a slum where people went to die because it was cheap, a sister who kept her alive when she fell sick, and stayed sick.
Bina felt a fire in those bellows in her chest, burning, licking at the massive grinding gears. She closed her metal hands into fists. She thought of the little girl in her skull, and this time there was an older girl beside her—her sister, safe inside the padded chamber, looking out across the empire through those huge windowed eyes, that empire once Mughal, now British, perhaps one day something else entirely. They looked out together, to the snap and flutter of pennants catching the wind outside. The little girl would keep her sister safe in that chamber.
“Walk, Bina,” said her sister. So she did.
Forty Pieces
Lucien Soulban
There was, there was not…. the older man read, his finger tracing the black stitching of ink on the yellowed page. “That is to say that this story is only true if Allah wills it. All tales begin this way.”
The young boy next to him fidgeted in the squeaking caned chair, his body given to the fits and hesitations of all five-year olds. The creaking of the chair betrayed his impatience; his delicate fingers touched the corners of the thick pages, eager for the adventure promised within the book. He did not care for the words, just the story. To Allah and five-year olds, all stories were true.
* * *
The student had left, and Tariq’s modest earnings for today’s lesson sat on the table in a stump of silver coins. Enough for some lamb from that Egyptian butcher, and green olives, tomatoes, and pita from the Palestinian grocer. Maybe with the remaining akçes, a glass of Greek Retsina wine from a Sherbet House where the Europeans drank.
The akçes provided nowhere near enough for anything else. Barely enough for a few days of oil or wood to warm those nights when Russia’s winter swept in from across the Black Sea. To think he’d arrived from Damascus with enough literature to wallpaper his Constantinople apartment with book spines. Tonight, he’d see far more of the water-stained walls than he cared to.
Tariq flung open the window and welcomed in the acrid smell of burning coal and the wash of brine from the Marmara. Noise flooded in as well, the shopkeepers and stall owners fought in decibels for clients while above the awning-covered streets and alleys of the Grand Bazaar puttered the air dhows. Their cypress wood prows and pine decks spoke of their fishing days, but their air bladders promised more of this new era, their flanks festooned in draping silks, or painted with oriental tigers and long-legged cranes, or finned with colorful side-sails like giant fish.
“Aziz,” Tariq cried to the shop beneath his apartment, the one with blue cloth for awning.
A man with a face dotted by ash-raised scars of the Nubian tribes and a berry-stained fez waved up at him. “More books? I’ll send the boy up,” the Nubian said, laughing. “But no more sciences, ah? People want adventure and poetry, my friend.”
Tariq frowned, but nodded before closing the window and turning back to his shelves. He was in short supply of those already. Perhaps the local madrassas would
take his science books for their students, he thought, and then dispelled the notion. If they realized who he was, who his father had been, he’d be driven out of Constantinople the way they’d driven his father from Damascus.
There was a knock at the door. Tariq knew Aziz, knew he’d only offer a couple of silver kuruŞ for rare volumes at best. That would be enough to continue treading water for a few weeks more. He opened the door.
The man waiting there did not work for the Nubian. He reached no higher than five-and-a-half-feet in height, his frame wiry and corded with muscles, a fact that not even his double-breasted frock coat and striped morning pants could hide. He removed his top hat, dislodging not one strand of black hair. His equally black eyes glittered over the gold frame of his spectacles. The spectacles had come from a madcap’s mind, the red lenses flipped up on a pivot near the arms, revealing the black lenses beneath… like the glass wings of a butterfly.
Tariq instantly distrusted the man. Never mind he felt underdressed in his homespun white cotton shirt and baggy trousers, it was the Steamkraft that unsettled him. Steamkraft, the Prussian’s marriage of the assembly line to madcap inventions, had become more than fashionable within the Ottoman Empire. As Prussia’s closest allies, the sultans turned what had been an evolution of assembly line warfare towards the Islamic arts of engineering and architecture. The Ottoman twilight became a new golden age, with Constantinople its brass pearl. Her newest minarets glittered with metal lace shells and copper inlay, the gears beneath turning under cascading water that transformed the towers into gigantic water clocks.
“Are you the bookseller?” the visitor asked in the perfect Arabic of the Koran in a region still muddied with regional dialects.
“Who asks?”
The man smiled deeply with white teeth. “Raakin, a humble servant.”
“You dress like no servant I know,” Tariq responded, glancing at the man’s expensive tastes in clothes. The silk shirt and bowtie alone was worth a year of Tariq’s time.
“My master is generous,” Raakin replied, the smile never wavering, “to anyone who demonstrates purpose.” He pulled a purse of coins from his breast pocket and tossed it up once to catch it. It jingled dully with a heavy weight, heavier than silver, heavy with the weight of fortune’s promises. “My master wishes to buy all your books.”
* * *
Why did I let him in? Tariq wondered, a self-admonishing thought that refused to let go, but he knew why. With the gold lira in Raakin’s purse, Tariq could live very extravagantly for a few short years or in modest comfort for decades.
It would serve his father right for burdening him like this. The books served only to provide his walls with color and remind him what his father had sacrificed—thrown away. They were all that remained of his family’s exodus from Damascus when they’d left behind a fortune in jade statues from China, ivory tusk-carvings from India, Mother-of-Pearl covered tables from Cairo, Persian rugs from Baghdad. All for a fortune in words, hardly worth a handful of akçes.
Now, however, Raakin stared at the walls of Tariq’s apartment, his face creased in displeasure and the uncertainty growing in Tariq’s breast.
“Where are all the books?” Raakin asked. “I heard you possessed a formidable library.” He motioned around him. “Old men have more teeth than this.”
Tariq tried not to bristle at the comment. “I make little money teaching,” he explained. The man nodded and smiled in a way that made Tariq feel as though he’d been trapped in the cage with a tiger.
“Where is the Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad?”
Tariq’s voice hitched in his chest. “Leave.”
“You did not sell it, did you?” Raakin asked. “That would be unfortunate.”
“Leave!” Tariq managed more forcefully, which seemed to amuse the visitor.
“Do you know that my employer told me to get the book by any means necessary?” he said, slowly walking past a row of books, his fingers tapping their edges. “I convinced him that gold silences tongues more easily than a knife across the throat. Will you make a liar out of me?”
Tariq darted toward the door, but a click of a hammer and a soft voice that said “No,” stopped him. The man held a large tri-barreled flintlock pistol, the sides adorned with etched silver plaques, the barrel wrought iron. He motioned Tariq to step away from the door.
“Dog,” Tariq muttered, obeying.
The visitor laughed sharply. “The book,” he said.
“The Gunpowder Alchemists leave no survivors, yes?” Tariq said.
“True,” Raakin said, “but we can be merciful. A tincture of Belladonna and other plants to give you a peaceful death, or I leave you in agony for days with corrosive shot until you beg me to end your life.” He raised his flintlock.
Tariq swallowed once, trying to whet his throat, but to no avail. He stepped to a row of books and pushed them aside. He reached into the gap between the shelf and the wall, and pulled out a bundle wrapped in dusty wool. A string wrapped it neatly together.
“Will you kill me now?” Tariq asked, ready for the retort of the flintlock.
A chuckle came in response.
* * *
A sea of Fez-topped heads crowded the street’s length. The stranger walked arm-in-arm with Tariq, like they were the oldest of friends, but the flintlock pressed into Tariq’s ribs said otherwise. Raakin smiled with no warmth to the act, just a fence of teeth.
They passed a row of steps where men sat and argued, newspapers in hand, their gestures made in emphatic motions. The debates followed orbits as familiar as the constellations themselves, the renaissance of the Ottoman Empire, the growing influence of Prussia in the region, the rapid Westernization of Constantinople.
“Why not just destroy the book?” Tariq asked. His family’s enemies certainly would have thrown it on the pyre along with his father had they captured either. They’d been driven out of Damascus for that book, escaping their sanctioned murder.
“Destroy?” Raakin said, pulling Tariq to a stop. “No no, my friend. The Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad is too valuable to destroy.”
“But—” Tariq hesitated.
“My employer found the City of Brass,” Raakin whispered with a look of delight.
“No,” Tariq said, his voice as distant as the horizon. His father was a fool for believing the legends. They’d lost everything for the mad dreams of ‘Abd-Es-Samad and his city. He had to be wrong—Tariq needed a reason to blame him.
“It is real. We need the book, and you to translate it. Now come,” he said, pulling Tariq along and motioning ahead. Tariq followed the gesture, his eyes resting on Imperial Aerotower, a massive four-walled edifice of marble blocks, windows covered in brass filigree, and hanging platforms from which three airships sat moored. It stood among the bramble of streets of the Galata business district, the cargo hauled up on iron cranes and creaking chains and groaning ropes. “We have a ship to catch.”
* * *
Tariq stood upon at the stub-nosed prow of the air dhow, sheltered by the air bladder and the fin sails that peeled away from the flanks. One hand shielded his eyes from the fine grit that peppered his face and hands. With the other, he gripped a thickly braided mooring rope securing the dhow to the balloon, distantly aware of the clash of ages. Steamkraft was fast changing the West’s identity, but in pockets like the Levant, Persia, India, and Africa, the new served only to validate the old… it did not replace it. The old fishing dhows that plied the Nile and the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea had a history as venerable as the book that Tariq held.
As the steam dhow caught the winds, it soared over the desert, the sands below bright with sun and shimmering with heat. The steering rudder, a long dagger of wood banded by iron, split the dunes, allowing the vessel to slalom through the desert with precision. Raakin leaned over and whispered something to the old bedu pilot who cackled at Tariq with tooth-starved gums, his eyes hidden behind a pair of leather goggles.
Tariq had been a hostage since Constantinople
; they’d landed in the silk city of Beyrouth along the cedar slopes of the Lebanon Mountains. From there, they boarded the dhow, Raakin ever-smiling, his blade and flintlock within reach. He sensed Tariq’s every intention with almost preternatural skill, always there with a knowing smile when Tariq contemplated escape. So Tariq had given up on flight, especially now that they flew well above the desert, a desert unlike any Tariq had ever seen.
The Syrian expanse of sand felt hard under one’s sandals and stretched out to the horizon with cypress trees and yellow wildflowers, cacti and thorny shrubs to break the plain. This desert, however, was an ocean storm petrified in time and turned to dust. Sand crested the sky and swept outward to flood the horizon. It gave the sense of being motionless and unceasing at the same time, and unknowable.
“It is why the bedu call it the Empty Quarter,” Raakin said, joining Tariq at the prow of the ship.
“My father was obsessed with the delusions of a madman,” Tariq said. “Now you follow one folly with another.”
“Iram of the Pillars, it is there.”
“Impossible,” Tariq said.
“You will see.” From the satchel hanging across his shoulder, Raakin took out his prize. Unadorned beige camel leather protected the Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad and sweat stains and the brown of dried blood spoke of its long history and longer travels. Tariq might have cursed its pages once, but now he wasn’t so sure. To hold something that at one time was nothing more than a collection of mad fables, and to discover that those words possibly hid the truth left Tariq numb.
Raakin handed the book to Tariq. The teacher hesitated and then took it, the rough camel hide smoothed by the centuries. Tariq ran his fingers across the simple cover, and then suspended the book over the dhow’s low wood gunwales and the racing desert below.
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