It was a slow process, or it seemed slow compared to all the deaths and the fires and the brutalities they had witnessed in Surayon, where injustice came at the speed of a blow, the leap of a flame; and yet it was too fast by years, by generations. Mortal bodies were not made to lose coherence suddenly or from within, except in the patient darkness of a crypt. What they watched here was like all the little secret changes happening between eyeblinks, the hand of time scrabbling in a frenzy. The King did not rot so much as crumble, like a corpse that had desiccated in the Sands and turned to sand itself, falling into dust as it lost any memory of itself.
It began in the eyes, where he had kept the only visible sign of his power or his strangeness, a glitter in the darkness, a hint of lights far off and busy. Now they shone and dazzled, and not only within the confines of his gaze; they shone through his skin, they danced in the spaces where his bones ought to be.
Light and shadow: it seemed that his flesh was shaped over something quite other than a skeleton. I do not serve he had said, and why should he, when his own body told the whole story of the God that Fulke would have him worship, when he was himself both battleground and battle?
The King had lost his bones to lights; he lost his skin, his flesh to dust. It fell away in trickles and runs, forgetful of its former shape. It seemed golden in the lamplight, and shimmered as it was swept up by the currents of light as they swirled and spun. There was no skull where his face was lost, only the patterns that dust could make in a silent, vicious wind that wound around itself, tightly and more tightly so. It ripped the Kings simple garment into shreds and tatters as the fabric fell in upon itself and was snared in the rushing of that wind; it showed its own weave only in the way it drew the dust like a line, like a thread bound round and round a spinning bobbin.
It might have been Elisande who knew first what it was, if she'd been alert to an early hint; it was Julianne's father who named it.
'Djinni,' he said, which was obvious to all of them by then, except perhaps to Fulke.
It gave him no response, beyond its rising like a pillar before them. It stretched itself until it had achieved almost the height and slender grace of the pillars round about, though it still hung poised above the old chest the King had sat on and it did not try to reach into the darkness of the dome.
'Djinni Khaldor,' the Shadow said. If he were Shadow still, if he had a King to serve and chose to serve him. He named the djinni as though he recognised it; the girls recognised the name, of course, and Elisande grunted, of course, as though she too should have known the immediate differences between this djinni and her own, or any. 'I think you lied to me, djinni. You said "It has always been me", and that is not true. The King was once the Duc de Charelles, and the Duc was once a young man whom I knew. I will swear that he was a man of normal flesh, whatever they say of him in the wider world; and he was still so, I think, still a man until he came to be King and closed himself into this place.'
The djinni said nothing. The man who had been Shadow while the King still had a shadow to cast took a slow, angry breath and faced his betrayal squarely; said, 'I have done you service enough in the last forty years that I think you owe me some questions answered.'
'You think I lie to you, and yet you will stand and demand answers. Your thinking is as loose as your understanding; you should grip more tighdy. I think that you have asked me questions enough for one man’s lifetime, and that in only half a life.'
‘I did not know then that you were a djinni.'
'You always knew that I was a djinni. What you did not know is that I was also the King. But ask your questions; I have said already that I will answer them. Only the answers may be dangerous to you, because knowledge is always chancy. I will not claim a price, except from Fulke who is paying it already.'
No one there said let Fulke go, or even thought it; at least one was guiltily delighted to see him held by a djinni's servant, claimed by the djinni itself.
Coren - who thought he would answer after this to no tide other than his name - said, 'Where is the King my master?'
‘I am the King your master.'
'Where is the man who was Due de Charelles before he was King of Outremer?' ‘I do not know.'
'It's lying,' Elisande said fiercely. 'Of course it knows, they always know. But Esren lied to me too, and they weren't supposed to do that. I thought the djinn were honest,' suddenly accusing, facing the creature where it rose, where it hovered, where it spun.
‘I know you did. Why did you?'
Another day she might not have answered, she might have been wise or cunning. But another day she would not have been here in the dim light and the heavy air, watching the way it leaned against the stillness, feeling the way it leaned against the truth.
'Because I have always been told so, because it seemed to be true, because it seemed right that something made of spirit could not lie.' Men walked on the edge of darkness always, groping for a path; their only light fell behind them to show where they had been, and they called it memory or history. Or God, Julianne said; lies, said Elisande. The djinn moved in a mist, perhaps, but they stood in a pool of light that fell all ways around them. It would be unfair, it would be wrong to see so much more and not describe it truly.
'Who was it told you?'
'My father,' and she said it firmly, determinedly, almost proudly.
'And who told him and his father, who was it told the world?'
That one she had to pause, to glance at her grandfather where he stood mute and impassioned, to think about; in the end there was only one answer possible. 'The djinn,' she said, chagrined for her entire race, for their innocence and gullibility.
'The djinn indeed. Myself, indeed, I said it. Long ago now; and often since, when men gave me the opportunity'
'What, and were you lying all the time?'
'Perhaps I was,' it said, as though that were something it too had to think about.
'Why, though? Why would you do that, great one, do you like to laugh at us little people as you lie?'
'I have laughed at humans, in my time. But perhaps I did it for some other reason; perhaps everything that I have ever done was done to bring us here, to this place and this conversation.'
She would have asked why? again, but Coren broke in to lead the djinn back to what it had said before, what Elisande had challenged.
'And are you telling the truth now, then? I will risk that, and ask again. Do you truly not know where the King my friend is to be found?'
'Truly, I do not. I have watched many a human die, and I still do not know where their spirits go when it happens.'
'Is he dead? Since when?'
'Since he died.'
'How long since?'
Almost forty years.'
'Did you kill him?'
'Not by my touch. I came to him, and he died; that was understood. I had foreseen it. So perhaps had he.'
Perhaps so; how could they tell, if the djinn could lie?
'What have you done with his body?'
For answer, it drifted a little away, to the further side of the rug-strewn dais. Briefly their eyes followed it, as though it were going to show them; then Elisande made a noise in her throat - contempt or self-contempt, even she was uncertain - and ran forward, jumped up, pulled open the lid of the old chest.
It would have been easily big enough to hold the new-slain body of a man, and a bigger man than the King had ever been. In fact what lay in there, half-curled like a child, was something smaller than Elisande herself, the figure of a wizened thing. She stooped and lifted it out into the light before either of the older men could reach her.
'It's not...'
She genuinely thought it was not a man at all, as she lifted it. Too light, too dry, too browned and tough ever to have been human: at first she thought it was another lie, a tease, a dead man sculpted, made, a mockery. Her own rather had put a poppet in a cell, and made it human-seeming; that had moved, at least, which this did not.
When she saw the skull s shape beneath the leather skin, when she saw how the thin black lips were drawn back from real teeth, she still did not think it was human, or the King. A giant monkey, dried and salted? It was still too small, too twisted surely to be a man ...
But there was white hair clinging to the scalp of it, and no fur else. And the skull had a human shape, like no monkey that she had ever seen or heard about; and yes, it was a man, of course it was, deny it as she liked she could not change it.
Instead she knelt and laid him on the carpets; looked up at her grandfather, at the father of her friend, and said, 'Is this him?'
'Oh, yes,' the Princip said, 'it isn't lying now.'
'It might be, about how he died ...'
'No.' Julianne had seen a man touched by the djinni, she knew what kind of death that was; and there was no visible mark on this body, only the terrible absence of its owner. Terrible and long-term: very soon after he closed the gates of the Dir'al Shahan. Outremer had been ruled by a djinni for a generation. And the djinn were supposed not to meddle in the affairs of men — but then the djinn were supposed not to He, not to be able to, and that had proved to be as false as any lie else.
Even so, it had been the experience of men for hundreds of years, that the djinn were not concerned with what they did or how they lived in the world. The first sign otherwise that she could think of was her own first meeting with a djinni, with this djinni. She gazed at it where it roiled in the dust of its own deception, and asked the first question of her own. 'Why are you so different? You're not like Esren, even, let alone like the djinn in the histories I've read, or the stories Jemel tells. What makes you play these games?' Why kill a king, and spend forty years in imitation of him?
'I am ... incomplete,' it said, with just the faintest hesitation before the word; she reminded herself again that it was a liar and an actor, supremely skilled at both. It likely had no feeling and no doubt, only intentions; she would not be swayed.
'In what way, incomplete?'
'I have given myself away,' it said. 'Small pieces of myself, to strengthen these my servants in their tasks,' and its servants were still going about their tasks in the shadows of the great chamber, no whit disturbed. Marron might have done that too, she thought, with his red eyes and his unnatural powers, with the Daughter slowly sealing him off from the world; she was ahead of the djinni already when it said, 'And rather more of me, of my substance went long ago. It is almost its own creature now, though not a djinni, far from that. There are those of my kind who will say that I am no longer truly of the djinn; its absence diminishes me, so that I can do these things and find some amusement in them.'
And now, at last, 'Why would you want to?' from Elisande, where she knelt still above the body of the King. 'You must have known that this would happen, that you would be — reduced,' in what was almost cruel imitation, except that she could see no way to be truly cruel to something that had no true humanity, only a decaying of its proper self.
'It was necessary. The 'ifrit meant to take this world from us.'
'I thought this world was ours.'
'Lisan. We are the djinn. Do your pastures belong to the cattle, does the soil belong to the worm? You may do as you will, but we are still the djinn. The 'ifrit, though - the 'ifrit wanted this world for themselves, and they thought they could take it. We are stronger, but they are many, they thought we would not fight them. Why should we risk death, for this crude clay?'
'They thought you would not fight them,' the Princip repeated. 'They were right, weren't they?'
'Of course.'
'You used us instead, you used men to fight your spirit-battles for you.'
'We cannot meet them in our own form; and if we take solid bodies in this world as they do, we become as vulnerable as they are. Even a man can kill us, with a blessed blade. So the King lives in seclusion, and we take what precautions we can.'
'Esren isn't cautious,' Elisande said, thinking of Rhabat and the flooding of the valley, an invasion of 'ifrit blocked by one djinni and a small inland ocean.
'That djinni is unique.' Uniquely damaged was what it seemed to mean. 'As am I. We are both unlike our kin.'
'That unlikeness didn't stop you using my land, my people for your war.' The Princip again, in a rising anger.
'Of course not. Men are always eager to fight. The Sharai and the Patrics would have fought each other anyway; they would both have fought in Surayon. I brought you together to let you fight for us.'
'And?'
'And what?'
'I thought you were going to go on to say that now we were all peaceful together, thanks to you.'
'That would be absurd. The Sharai and the Patrics will fight again; they will both fight the Surayonnaise.'
'But not yet,' Coren interrupted, over the Princip's grunt, 'not for a while yet. I will be sure of that much. And don't tell us who will win those fights, djinni; foreknowledge is not a human gift, because it is not a gift to humans.'
'But the 'ifrit have foreknowledge too,' Julianne objected. 'They must have known that you were leading all our armies into Surayon to face them ...'
'Of course; but death clouds the image. They knew there would be a battle, and so did we; they hoped to win it, and so did we. They did what they could to keep your armies apart and fighting each other. If the most powerful forces in the Sanctuary Land destroyed themselves, then the 'ifrit could rule unchallenged; we would have nothing to set against them for a generation. Men fight like dogs, they hardly needed to encourage you. And then they are an army in themselves, faith is the only weapon that men have against them; and they hoped to have the Ghost Walker among their ranks, to lead the Sand Dancers and so the Sharai in a holy war. That would have been a triumph. The King's Daughter is a part of me, and they could have used it against me and mine.'
'Would the Sharai have followed Morakh? The tribes hate the Sand Dancers . . .'
'If he was the Ghost Walker,' Elisande said, 'and if he showed them they could drive the Patrics out of Outremer? Even at the cost of letting in the 'ifrit, they'd have followed him. They hate the Patrics worse than anything.'
'We were lucky, then.'
'For a while. Lucky often, I think. So many times it could have gone wrong; from that first day where you met us in the road,' and Elisande addressed the djinni again, 'and started moving us around ...'
'It started before that,' Julianne corrected, 'when it called my father away so that I'd be alone on the road, so that I could meet you and then it could persuade us both, without a man there to interfere. Except for Blaise, I mean ...' Her voice faltered as she remembered, as she glanced aside to see where he stood quite impassive, with the figure of Fulke silent beside him. Pain or terror had broken that one utterly, she thought, unless it was simply helplessness, that terrible weight of certainty, too much for any man to stand against...
'I had started long before that,' the djinni said. 'I knew what I would need, and when need it; I have been preparing this for forty years.'
'Julianne, I met your mother on a mission for the King,' her father told her suddenly, 'and it was I who brought your parents together, Elisande, and proposed the match to your grandfather here, under the suggestion of the King.'
Foreknowledge is not a gift to humans; sometimes, neither is its inverse. The girls looked at each other, and it was a shared decision that had them suddenly turning away, walking away, crossing that wide pillared space without a glance back. None of the men there sought to detain them.
The djinni presumably had known that they would go, had been entirely ready for it.
'Everything we are,' Julianne murmured as they came out into sunshine at last, in the courtyard of the Dir'al Shahan, 'everything we do. It knows everything. Did it make us, or did it just predict us? I can't work it out.'
'I don't think there's a distinction. What are you going to do, Julianne?'
'I don't know. I wish I could spite it somehow, but it's too late for that, the war's over.'
/>
'And we won,' Elisande said glumly. 'But there'll be other wars, it said so. Only we'll just be fighting for ourselves next time, and I don't know if that's better or worse.'
'Worse. Definitely. I think... And how could we know, anyway? Maybe it's still using us, against the next time the 'ifrit want to fight. Whatever it tells us, whatever it chooses to tell us, it knows exactly how we're going to react anyway, so we might as well ignore it and do what we think is right for us, for Outremer, for Surayon
'Or for the Sharai? You're still married to Hasan, my love.'
'I know. And I love him, I want what's best for him and all of us.'
And Imber?'
'Him too. I love them both.'
'Tricky. You can't stay married to them both.'
'Can't I?'
'Oh, what? Julianne ...'
'Why not? My father'll love it. What better way to keep peace as long as possible between them, than to have one girl married to the lords of both armies?'
'The men won’t accept it.'
'I think they will, they'll have to. It's my ultimatum: if either one wants me, they have to be prepared to share me. Neither one recognises the other marriage anyway, so that's not a problem. I can be true wife to each, just that I spend a lot of time away and travelling without them.'
'But you can't, you can't have children, not to either one of them ...'
'No.' Traditionally children sealed an alliance, but here it was impossible. And both girls meant more than that in any case, they meant that she couldn't share either man's bed, not even once, or the whole delicate structure she was trying to build here would come crashing down. She had lied, when she said she could be a true wife; she could be a virgin wife, but nothing more. To sleep with one would be to cuckold the other, by their own laws or any. That would be political disaster, and personal catastrophe.
'Oh, Julianne ...'
'It's all right, sweet. I can find my comforts, be a power in the shadows on both sides, it's what my father trained me for all my life.' And Hasan had his other wives, and Imber -well, Imber would suffer and endure, and be noble and honest and not take a lover because she was the one that he loved and the one that he'd married. Mostly, he would suffer, and she'd suffer to see it, and there would be nothing that either of them could do except to remind themselves that it was a small price to pay for peace, for as long as the peace should last. 'What about you, though, what will you do?'
Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 Page 64
