The air is dry, with the faint smell of ozone everywhere, mixing with the pungent odour of unwashed bodies. There is music, shadow-players who create images on the sides of high pillars, cafés with old men with faces marked by wildcode playing chess. Chimera acrobats in silk robes, sapphire-enhanced muscles gleaming.
Abu stops to give a few sobors to a man who has a chimera beast in a cage, a fetus-like pink thing the size of a dog, with a blue transparent shell and sharp spider legs. The man bows to him many times, loudly proclaiming to his audience that the creature is a prince of Fast New York, transformed into this shape by the Aun, and that it understands holy texts. It spells out answers to questions with a sharp tap-tap-tap of its legs on concrete. In the athar, Tawaddud sees the chains that make the creature an extension of the handler’s mind.
‘You should be careful, Abu dear,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to become one of my patients.’ And no doubt you have jinni bodyguards following us that would stop you if you tried to do anything stupid.
‘What a terrible fate that would be. I’m sure there are those who go to the desert just so they can be treated by you.’
‘I warn you: my medicines can be bitter.’ She pats her doctor’s bag.
Abu looks at her curiously. ‘Why do you do it? Come here, I mean.’
‘Perhaps you will see, before the day is over. What do you make of the Banu Sasan?’
Abu smiles. ‘I grew up here.’
Tawaddud blinks. ‘That is a story I would like to hear.’
‘Too long to be told on an afternoon walk, I’m afraid. I do not speak of it often: it is difficult enough for me to deal with the muhtasib families without being a Soarez, Ugarte, Gomelez or Uzeda.’ Abu spreads his hands. ‘No matter how many gogols my mutalibun bring back from the desert.’
‘So, in your position, a wise man would be looking for the hand of a younger daughter of a muhtasib House? Even one with a . . . less than perfect reputation?’
Abu looks down. ‘I had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon with a beautiful woman without discussing such things.’
There is such sadness in his human eye that Tawaddud almost tells him the truth: that he should never marry a girl who loves only monsters. Then the wound left by Duny’s smile stings again. I am going to show Father who I really am. But not like she thinks.
Tawaddud touches Abu’s shoulder lightly.
‘You are right. Let us leave marriages and Houses up on the Shards, where they belong. Here, no one cares who we are. And that is one reason why I come here.’
As always, Tawaddud sets up her practice next to a defaced Sobornost statue – a bearded man with a machinist’s tools, now covered in athar scrawls and patches of wildcode.
As Abu watches, Tawaddud unfolds her stall from her bag: components that open up into spindly structures like giant insect legs. She turns them into a tent with a small table and a bed. She spreads out her gear and the jinni bottles. Almost as soon as she is finished, the patients start coming.
They line up outside the tent and, one by one, Tawaddud does the best she can. Most are simple hauntings, easily dispelled. Actual wildcode infections are more difficult but, fortunately, the ones today are not too bad. Merely a boy who has glowing v-shaped dashes all over his skin, chasing each other, moving in flocks like birds. He claims they are ancient symbols of victory and would like to keep them, but Tawaddud points out that they will grow and take over his skin entirely.
She studies the boy with athar vision, gently cupping his face.
‘You have been in the desert again,’ Tawaddud chides. The boy twitches, but Tawaddud grips his face firmly. ‘Let me see.’
She takes one of the little jinn bottles from her belt, opens it and lets the software creature out, a cloud of sharp triangles in the athar.
‘I thought I told you not to go there,’ she says.
‘A man needs to have a dream, my lady, and the dreams are in the desert,’ the boy says.
‘I see you are going to be a poet next. Hold still.’ The little jinn eats the wildcode in the boy’s frontal lobe. ‘This might hurt a little. But if you don’t stay out of the way of the mutalibun, you are not going to be much use to anyone.’
‘I’m too fast for them to catch me,’ the boy says, wincing. ‘Like Mercury Ali.’
‘He wasn’t fast enough in the end: no one runs away from the Destroyer of Delights for ever.’
‘Except the flower prince,’ the boy says. ‘The thief who never dies.’
In the afternoon they bring her the ghul.
It is the wife of one of the sapphire acrobats, a lean, muscled woman with dark curls in a tight sobor-fabbed dress. The acrobat leads her by the hand. She follows him like a child, an empty look in her eyes.
Tawaddud sits her down in the tent. ‘Can you tell me your name?’ she asks gently.
‘Chanya,’ the girl says.
‘Her name is Mari,’ says the acrobat gruffly.
Tawaddud nods. ‘Do you know where she got it from?’
The acrobat spits and hands Tawaddud a smooth, transparent sheet. ‘Found them in her tent,’ he says. ‘Burned them. Kept one to show you.’
Tawaddud glances at the page of dense text. The words dance in her eyes, and pull her in.
The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon
Before the Cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer’s son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun – the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hearts of men.
The story he loved best was the story of the Lost Jannah of the Cannon, the sacred place guarded by the Aun, the underground city where the first uploaded souls dreamt and turned in their sleep.
‘Take me with you,’ he would say. ‘I will carry your burdens. I will rake through sand for jinn jars. No task will be too low for me if you will only let me be a mutalibun.’
But the old mutalibun scratched their beards and shook their heads and said no, never explaining why. One night, he got an ancient one to talk by spending a day’s pay on honey wine.
‘You want too much,’ the old man said, a sad smile on dried lips. ‘A mutalibun does not want. He finds, he takes, but he does not want. Jinni and lost jannahs are less to him than dust. Cast asides your desires, boy, and maybe then you will be a mutalibun.’
By day, the boy wired, made paths for the jinni to travel – the cable reel a constant burden on his back, his arms and shoulders aching – but he also thought. Surely, the old men were tired, tired of the sapphire roughness of their skin, lost in the desert dreams that the wildcode brings. Even his father with his small dreams had taken him to the spiderwoman of al’Qala’a to receive her gifts so he could climb higher, clinging to walls with the tiny spikes in his palms and feet.
Surely you had to want to succeed, to climb higher than others? The more he thought about the old man’s words, the more the desert burned in his mind, like the sun up on the Shards, beating on his brow.
He bedded a tavern girl with promises and the hungry gaze of his dark eyes and promised her jinn rings and thinking dust that would glitter in her hair like stars. And so she became his accomplice: she slipped a spiderwoman’s drug into the drink of a tired mutalibun, took his Seal armour and rukh stick and gave them to the young man. And so, in the dawn, he donned the garments of the mutalibun and joined a group of the treasure-hunters at the gate of Bab in the dawn, heading out to the desert.
Now, back then, even more so than now, the mutalibun were a taciturn lot. They save their voices and speak with signs, if at all. Even their hunter jinni are silent, shadows that come out of their bottles and pursue dead dreams at night, like dark gusts of wind with teeth. So the young man was taken as one of their
comrades, just another hunched figure in the long walk to the mountains of the rukh. But he almost gave himself away when they stopped to rest on the first night, in a glade of windmill trees: he tried to open his water flask before the leader did. A dark look from another mutalibun saved him.
But his dreams drove him onward, and all around the wildcode desert listened.
The city he had been searching was there, suddenly, the Jannah of the Cannon, shining like a jewelled dream. But it seemed that the mutalibun would simply pass it by, and so he made signs to the leader to change direction. The old man just shook his head. And so the young man strode out on his own, leaving the column, and entered the city, certain that only he had the courage to lay claim to the secrets within.
Walking the streets alone, he felt like a king. There were jinn machines from a lost age, virtual worlds you could enter with a thought; machine bodies that jinni used to wear, more beautiful than any love-slave he had ever seen. They called out to him and he took his mutalibun’s tools to cut out and bottle their souls.
And then the Aun came to him in their glory. The Chimney Princess. The Kraken of Light. The Green Soldier. The Flower Prince.
Tell us a true story or we will take your life, they said.
But the boy only knew one true story.
Before the Cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr—
Tawaddud looks away. How did the ancients deal with this? Ghosts in their heads, made by others, everywhere they looked, ready to possess them and to do their bidding. But in Sirr, the ghosts are real, and they hide themselves in stories.
‘I think I know this one,’ Tawaddud says. She puts on her glasses, summons her athar vision again, speaks the words the Axolotl taught her. And there, two entwined loops in the girl’s head, clearly visible.
‘Ahmad,’ she says harshly, looking at the girl. ‘Ahmad the Sickness.’ A filament of neurons lights up in the girl’s brain. Got you.
‘Ahmad, I know it’s you. Do you know who I am?’
The girl snickers, suddenly, an odd, high-pitched sound. ‘Oh yes, baby, I know you, the Axolotl’s whore, long time, no see,’ she says, in a hissing voice.
Next to her, Abu Nuwas draws a sharp breath. Damn it. Not now. So much for the plan at getting back at Duny, so much for seduction. Tawaddud shakes her head and bites down on the disappointment. Muhtasib plots or not, she has a patient to treat.
‘So you know what I can do?’ She lowers her voice. ‘I know Secret Names that will root you out. If I speak them, they will find you and eat you. Is that what you want?’
‘Mahmud, what is she saying?’ says the girl, suddenly. ‘Where am I? Don’t let her hurt me.’
The acrobat takes a step forward, but Tawaddud holds up one hand. ‘Don’t listen to her, it’s a trick.’ She looks into the girl’s eyes. ‘Go away, Ahmad. Let this girl’s self-loop swallow you. Go back to the City, and I won’t tell the Repentants where your lair is. What do you say?’
The girl tears herself from the acrobat’s grip and leaps up. ‘Bitch! I will eat your—’
Tawaddud speaks the first syllables of the Thirty-Seventh Secret Name. The girl hesitates. Then she lays down on the mat on the floor. ‘You win,’ she says. ‘I’ll give your regards to the Axolotl. I hear he has a new squeeze.’
Then the girl goes limp, closes her eyes and starts breathing steadily. Tawaddud watches her brain for a few moments to make sure that the thing called Ahmad is letting its self – sneaked into the poor girl’s mind through words and athar – dissolve into nothingness. The girl’s eyes start fluttering behind closed eyelids.
‘She is going to sleep for a day or two,’ Tawaddud tells Mahmud the acrobat. ‘Surround her with familiar things. When she wakes up, she should be fine.’
She shoos away Mahmud’s excessive thanks, suddenly tired but triumphant. She looks at Abu and nods. See? That’s the other reason I come. She looks for signs of disgust or horror on the gogol merchant’s face, but sees only his brass eye, glittering with a strange hunger.
The patients finally thin out by nightfall. Abu Nuwas buys two shawarma wraps from a street vendor, and they eat together, sitting cross-legged on the inflatable mattress inside the tent. Outside are the noises of Banu Sasan, the constant rattle of the soul trains, flashes and booms of the Station, the chill of the Sobornost buildings slowly eaten by wildcode.
‘You know, I don’t come back here very often,’ Abu says. ‘Perhaps I should. To remind myself how much there is to fix. How much wildcode there is.’
‘Without wildcode we would all be Sobornost slaves already.’
Abu says nothing.
Tawaddud cradles the hot wrap in her hands for warmth.
‘So, what do you think about the stories they tell about the girl from House Gomelez now?’ she asks. No point in pretending anymore.
‘What the body thief called you,’ Abu says. ‘Is it true?’
Tawaddud sighs.
‘Yes, the stories are true. I ran away from my first husband to the City of the Dead. A jinn there took care of me. We became close.’
‘A jinn. The Axolotl?’
‘Some call him that. His name is Zaybak.’
‘He really exists?’
That’s what Tawaddud first thought as well: a story come to life, the Father of Body Thieves, who came to Sirr a hundred years ago and became half the city.
‘Yes. But not everything they say about him is true. He did not mean to do what he did.’ She puts the remains of her food away. ‘But if you want a reason to give to my father, Axolotl’s whore is as good as any.’ Tawaddud closes her eyes and tugs at her hair, hard. ‘But thank you for a pleasant afternoon, and for showing me the city. The other city, I mean. That was nice.’
Abu turns and looks away. With his brass eye hidden, he looks terribly young, all of a sudden: for all his wealth, he must be younger than she is.
‘Do not trouble yourself,’ Tawaddud says. ‘I’m used to it.’
‘It’s not that,’ Abu says. ‘There is a reason I don’t come here.’ He touches his brass eye. ‘You asked for my story. Do you still want to hear it?’ His voice is flat, and his human eye is closed.
Tawaddud nods.
‘My parents died in the Cry of Wrath. I stayed with a Banu woman who let me sleep in her tent, for a while. When she found out I could hear the Aun, she sold me to an entwiner. I was six. It wasn’t like what the Council entwiners do. It was forced.
‘I was put in a tank, warm water, no sound, nothing else. Then there was another voice in my head, a thing that had once been a man, a jinn, screaming in pain. Its name was Pacheco. It swallowed me. Or I swallowed it. I don’t know how long it took, but when they let me – us – out, I was thin like a stick. I couldn’t stand. My eye ached. But I could see athar, touch athar. I couldn’t find my way around at first because I got lost in the ghost buildings in the Shadow.
‘And I could hear the desert, the jannahs and the heavens, old machines from the other side of the world, calling.
‘The entwiner was happy. He sold me to a mutalibun party. They took me to the desert to find gogols.’ Abu smiles. ‘Fortunately, I turned out to be rather good at it. Don’t get me wrong, it was not all bad. The mutalibuns’ rukh ship was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, white-hulled, curved like a chip of wood, and as light; the rukh birds carried it lightly and the hunter jinni rode with it like bright clouds. And the desert, I don’t know why they still call it the desert, there are roads and cities and wonders, herds of von Neumann machines, dark seas of the dead, sand that listens to you and makes your dreams come true—’
Abu shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’m babbling. None of it matters. I am an ill-made muhtasib, a thing, only half a man. So I cannot love as a man. I wanted to find someone who could understand both the jinn and the man. I thought—’ He squeezes his temples with his wrists.
‘It’s not about that, not just that, you un
derstand. I . . . believe in what your father is trying to do. We can’t just keep pretending the Sobornost is going to go away, and the hsien-kus are much more sane than some of the other ones, so no matter what you feel or want, I’m going to help him.’
Tawaddud swallows. This is not how it was supposed to go. Twin snakes of guilt and pity chase each other inside her chest.
‘Maybe I should go,’ Abu says.
‘Ssh,’ Tawaddud says and kisses him.
His brass eye is cold and hard against her eyelid. His lips are dry, his tongue unpractised. She caresses his cheek, nuzzles his neck. He sits still like a statue. Then she pulls away, opens her bag, takes out the beemee net and carefully weaves it in her hair.
‘What are you doing?’ he whispers.
‘This is not how it usually goes,’ she says, laughing. ‘Kafur would kill me if he knew.’ She opens her bodystocking at the neck, pulls it open all the way to her navel. She takes his hands and places them on her breasts. She whispers the Secret Name of al-Latif the Gentle, sees its shape before her eyes, focuses on its spirals and recursive twists like she was taught, and the tingle of a beemee connection comes in an instant.
‘You thought to court a woman who has lain with both jinni and men,’ she whispers. ‘You would find that Kafur’s Palace of Stories drives a cheaper bargain than Cassar Gomelez.’
‘I know I shouldn’t have,’ he says haltingly. His hand shakes slightly as he traces the shape of the aureola of her left breast with a finger, gently, uncertainly. The promise of the touch makes her tingle all over.
‘But when I heard the stories—’
‘Stories are things of the evening, not the night, and the night is here,’ she chides, kissing him again, drawing him close, opening his robes.
‘Is there anything I can give you to—’
‘You can tell my father that this is not all I am good for,’ she hisses in his ear. ‘Tell him that I want to serve him like my sister does.’
The beemee hums around her temples. His hands wander down her belly, caress her back.
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