I close my eyes and concentrate on distracting myself from the pain with whiskey from my cabin’s tiny fabber. I could just turn off the aches, of course. But like my friend Isaac taught me a long ago on Mars, alcohol is not just about chemistry: it’s the meme, the feeling, Bacchus speaking in my head and making it all better. At least, that’s the theory. This time, the malt tastes a lot like guilt.
Nevertheless, I take a deep sip. As I drink, one of the ship’s butterfly avatars enters the cabin. I look at it. It says nothing.
‘Look, it was the only way,’ I say. ‘It had to think it had a way out. I could not edit the firmament in the Sobornost parts, it had to be the Oortian tech. I had to give it access to you to trap it, take a part of you in with me. I’m sorry.’
The butterfly says nothing. Its wings remind me of the jewel I saw in Sumanguru’s memories. The fire of the gods. Some of the Founder’s anger mixes with the emotion. Down, boy, I tell it.
‘There is a honeytrap in every con,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry it had to be you.’
‘You are not sorry,’ the ship says. ‘You are Jean le Flambeur. Why would you be sorry?’ The butterfly settles on the edge of my glass. Its white reflection is distorted by the thin pseudomatter and the golden liquid at the bottom.
‘I thought you could help Mieli, on Mars, I really did. That you could show her that she did not have to obey the pellegrini. I thought you saw there was a different side to her. You even made her sing. But in the end, you are just like her. You will become anything to get what you think you want.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ I say. ‘You are just a . . .’ I hesitate. Servant? Slave? Lover? What is the ship to Mieli, really? In the end, I have no idea. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter.
‘You seem to be fond of that word today.’
‘I’m fond of my skin,’ I say. ‘I don’t deny that. And I’m not going back to the Prison, or whatever hell the cop thing had in store for me. At least I’ve dealt with the pellegrini before. Her I can handle.’ I hold my tongue. The goddess is always listening, no doubt. But the ship does not seem to be worried about that.
‘Oh yes?’ the butterfly says. ‘Is that why you are letting her manipulate you into trying the impossible?’
‘You don’t understand the stakes here, ship. If the chen has a Spike artefact that can do what I think it can—’
‘I understand the stakes that matter to me,’ Perhonen says. ‘Do you?’
It is surprisingly difficult to win a staring contest with a butterfly, even when you are wearing the face of the greatest warlord in the Solar System. So in the end, I look away.
‘I need to be free,’ I say. ‘So I can try again. I had something on Mars, and I threw it away. I almost think I got caught on purpose, can you believe that? The pellegrini showed me what I did, last time. A lot of things came back with it, about her, about Earth, about what she is after.’ I rub the bridge of my nose. The scar tissue is rough and alien.
‘You see, I had a plan, a perfect plan – but I did not use it. Instead, I went right up against the chen. To see if I could take him.’ I shake the glass and the butterfly alights. I pour myself more whiskey. ‘So it’s not about Jean le Flambeur. It’s about getting rid of him.’
‘This plan of yours,’ the ship says, slowly. ‘Will it work?’
‘It will. Except that after what happened, I’m not sure Mieli will ever go along with it.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
So I tell her the story of the warmind and the Kaminari jewel. I tell her about the insurance heavens and the city of Sirr and the Aun and the body thieves. Not everything, of course, but enough to convince her that it will work. And that it will be me doing the heavy lifting, this time. The butterfly listens. I wonder if somewhere inside my head or far away, the pellegrini is laughing.
‘You are right,’ Perhonen says, finally. ‘Mieli will never do it. She’ll die first.’
With a force of will, I turn my face back into my own. ‘So, what are we going to do?’ I place the glass carefully in the air, like a chess piece. It’s your move.
‘What you do best,’ the ship says. ‘We are going to lie to her.’
12
TAWADDUD AND THE QARIN
The Story of Tawaddud and the Axolotl
The girl who loved only monsters walked alone through the narrow streets of the City of the Dead.
The ghuls looked at her with empty eyes, huddled around the warmth of the server tombs.
It was instinct that had led her to this place, more than anything: looking for a place where the Repentants or Veyraz would not find her. She could pretend to be a ghul, if anyone came. She would be safe here, amongst the dead.
A ghul started following her. She kept walking.
Duny had come back from the entwiner a different person, a jinn jar around her neck, two beings in one. The girl could not go to her. She did not know her anymore.
And Father—
The ghul grabbed her arm. He was tall, shrivelled, with a filthy matted beard, but his grip was strong.
‘I SHOT THE OUTLAW ANGEL IN THE DAWN,’ he screamed. ‘CURSE YOU, MARION, IT SAID, BURNING—’ He shouted directly at her face, voice monotonous, the story coming out with the terrible smell of rotting teeth. She wrenched away from his grip and ran.
She did not get far. More ghuls came out from the tombs, blinking against the daylight, whispering their own stories, a hollow chorus. Before she could flee, they were all around her, touching, pressing against her, a muttering mass of filthy humanity. She covered her ears against the stories but they tore her hands away—
A cold wind came, tearing at her hair and face, something sharp in it, like sand. It had a voice.
‘This . . . one . . . is . . . mine,’ it said.
The ghul crowd moved as one, carrying her with it. They pressed her against one of the tombs. Her head banged against the hot wall. A darkness came, but before it took her, she was lifted into the air by hands made of sand.
‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ asked a voice when she awoke. There was only darkness apart from a jinn thought-form, a face made from tiny, pale flames.
What could she say? That she grew up on the Gomelez Shard, in her father’s palace. That soon after she was eight, the Cry of Wrath came and took away her mother.
That she liked to escape her jinn tutors: she had a liking for the ancient tongues and learned many secret words with which to confuse them.
That after her sister went to the entwiner to be a muhtasib, she was lonely. She craved to hear forbidden stories, wanted to see treasure hunters return from the desert: wanted to speak to the ghuls and the old jinni in the City of the Dead. That, instead, her father gave her to Veyraz.
‘I am Tawaddudd,’ she said. ‘Thank you for saving me.’
The tomb was not large, barely more than an access space between the humming machines that housed the jinn’s mind in the rough concrete building made with ghul labour. There was sand on the floor. The only light was the jinn’s face.
‘So, you are the girl the Repentants are looking for?’ the jinn said. His voice was soft, a little shy, but human. ‘You should leave.’
‘I will,’ she said, massaging her head. ‘I only need to rest. I will leave in the morning, I promise.’
‘You do not understand,’ the jinn said. ‘I am not a thing you want to spend your nights with. This is not a place for your kind.’
‘I am not afraid,’ she said. ‘You can’t be worse than the Repentants. Or my husband.’
The jinn laughed. It was a sound like a flame laughing, a staccato hiss and crackle. ‘Oh, dear child, you have no idea.’
‘Do you have a name?’ Tawaddud asked.
The face of flame fluttered.
‘Once, I was called Zaybak,’ it said. ‘You made me laugh. For that, you may rest here, and not be afraid.’
That is how the girl who loved monsters came to live in the tomb of Zaybak the jinn, in the City of the Dead. The food was meagr
e, and the days long, repairing tombs with ghuls and other servants of the jinni. She made Zaybak’s tomb a little more comfortable, with rugs and pillows and candles and clay pots for water.
When she asked the other jinni about Zaybak, they would only whisper.
‘He wants to die,’ said one ghul. ‘He is tired. But there is no death in the City of the Dead.’
But when they were together, Zaybak did not talk about death. Instead, he answered all the questions she had, even those her jinn tutors had never spoken about.
‘What is it like in the desert?’ she asked, one evening. ‘I always wanted to go and see, like the mutalibun.’
‘The desert of the mutalibun is not our desert. Ours is full of life, rivers of thought and forests of memory, castles made of stories and dreams. Our desert is not a desert.’
‘So why did you come here? Why do the jinni come to Sirr?’
‘You cannot imagine what it is like to be a jinn. It is always cold. No virs, no body. But we remember bodies: they itch and hurt and ache. There is the athar, of course, but it is not the same. Here, at least, there is warmth. We yearn for it.’
‘If it is so terrible, why don’t you have any ghuls, like the others? Why do you live alone?’
The jinn said nothing after that. It left the tomb, sent its mind somewhere else, and that night she fell asleep in the cold.
After several nights, Zaybak returned. She lit candles and made the tomb beautiful. She washed herself in the cooling water tank and combed her matted hair with her fingers.
‘Tell me a story,’ she said.
‘I will not,’ Zaybak said. ‘You are mad to ask me for such a thing. You should leave, go back to your family.’
‘I don’t know why you are punishing yourself. Tell me a story. I want it. I want you. I have seen it in my sister. She is never alone. You could be inside me. And you’d never need to be cold again.’
‘You don’t want to touch me. If you do, you will hate me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You are a good person, Zaybak. I don’t know what you think you have done. I only know it would make me happy to be a part of you.’
Zaybak was quiet for a long time, so long that Tawaddud thought he had gone again in anger, never to return. But then he started speaking, in a soft voice, a storyteller’s voice.
The Story of Zaybak and the Secret
When I was young, I had a body. I lived in a city. Every morning, I would take a train. I remember it shaking. I remember what it smelled like, of people, of fast food, of coffee. I remember thinking how easy it was to imagine being someone else, like the tattooed boy in a blue sports shirt, the girl with her head bent over a play, muttering lines. All it took was the flicker of an expression, a brief eye contact.
That’s what I remember about the train. But I don’t remember where it was going.
I do remember when everything broke. Drones falling from the sky. Buildings moving on their foundations, like big animals waking up. Booms in the distance, spaceships in the sky, running away.
After that, an eternity of dark and cold.
When I woke up to my second life, it took a long time to learn to survive. To slow myself down to run in the brains of chimera, to dream lucid dreams so I would not go mad. I made myself a dream-train, where I could be other people. It took me through the years, shaking and shuddering.
One day in my train I looked up, and saw the flower prince.
He had his hand on the yellow bar in the ceiling, leaning lightly backwards. His jacket was blue velvet. He wore a flower in his lapel. His face was all grin, not really a face at all.
‘What are you doing here, Zaybak, all alone?’ he asked. I thought it a dream and laughed.
‘Should I taste the flesh of rukh or chimera beasts, like my brothers?’ I said. ‘I prefer to dream.’
‘Dreaming is good,’ he said, ‘but one day you have to wake up.’
‘To be a bodiless mind in the desert? To be captured by the mutalibun, to be put in a jar, to serve the fat lords and ladies of Sirr until they deign to set me free?’ I asked. ‘Even nightmares are better than that.’
‘What if I could tell you how to make their fat bodies yours?’ he asked, mocking eyes flashing.
‘How would I do that?’
He put an arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear. ‘Let me tell you a secret,’ he said.
Let me tell it to you now, Tawaddud, so we may be one.
There was a time when the girl who loved monsters and Zaybak were almost like a qarin and a muhtasib – or more: she was not his master nor his slave. They looked for secret places together, walked the City of the Dead and the secret pathways of the Banu Sasan.
For a time, they became a new person. Tawaddud would look at rain falling on the tombs and the steam rising from their roofs, and it would be as if Zaybak saw it for the first time.
One day, a man called Kafur came to the City of the Dead. He had once been tall and handsome, but walked with a limp, and covered his body and head in a cloak and a scarf.
‘I have heard,’ he told the ghuls, ‘that there is a woman who has tamed the Axolotl.’ The ghuls whispered and took him to see Tawaddud.
Tawaddud offered him tea and smiled. ‘Surely, such rumours are nothing but stories,’ she said. ‘I am just a poor girl, living in the City of the Dead, serving the jinni for my keep.’
Kafur looked at her and stroked his short beard. ‘Yes, but is that all you want to be?’ he asked. ‘You are from a good family, I can tell. You are used to a better life than this. If you come with me, I will show you what a woman who knows how to make jinni do her bidding can be in Sirr.’
Tawaddud shook her head and sent him away. But when she thought about it – her musings mingling with the Axolotl’s – she did miss the company of people, of beings who did not live in tombs, whose touch was not sand. Perhaps she should go, said the part of her that was Zaybak. I will never leave him, said the part that was Tawaddud. Or perhaps it was the other way around.
One morning she told Zaybak that she had dreamed of a train.
‘You will turn into me,’ Zaybak said. ‘I am too old and strong.’
‘Yes, you are my big jinn, my terrible Axolotl,’ Tawaddud teased.
‘Yes, I am. I am the Axolotl.’
Tawaddud was silent.
‘I thought he was only mocking you,’ she whispered.
‘I told you I stole the first body. I came to Sirr from the desert and almost made it mine.’
Tawadudd closed her eyes.
‘My grandfather was there the night the Axolotl came, the night of the ghuls,’ she says. ‘He said it was like a plague. All it took was a whisper from a stranger to be processed. The streets were filled with blank-eyed people who would stop to stare at things, to cut their own flesh, to eat endlessly, to make love.’
‘Yes.’
‘In the end they took the first ghuls up to the top of Soarez Shard. Husbands took the wives they no longer knew, mothers took their children who spoke with strange voices. Then they cast them down into the desert.’
‘Yes’
‘The Repentants started hunting stories then. It was death to tell a thing that was not true.’
‘Yes.’ Zaybak was silent for a while. ‘I would like to tell you I did not mean it. That I was swallowed by the flesh, that I lost myself in the wave of so many self-loops, that I did not know what I was doing. But I would be lying. I was hungry. And I am still hungry. Tawaddud, If you stay with me, your thoughts will be my thoughts and nothing else. Is that what you want?’
‘Yes!’
No, said a part of her, but she could not tell which one.
When she woke up, the tomb was cold and silent, and she could no longer remember what the steam rising from the tombs in the morning reminded her of. She sat there until the sun was high and tried to remember the secret of the flower prince, but it was gone, gone with Zaybak the Axolotl.
Then the girl who loved monsters but one above al
l gathered her things and went to live in the Palace of Stories. But that is another story.
When the story finishes, Tawaddud is Arcelia and Arcelia is Tawaddud. She is in something warm and solid and looks at her hands, more beautiful than the hands she remembers, scented and oiled and covered in intricate swirls of red and black, adorned with golden rings. Tawaddud lifts her hands, Arcelia’s hands to her face, like a blind woman, feeling her features. A dark-faced man is watching them but Tawaddud tells her there is nothing to worry about, that he is a friend and will not hurt them.
Tell me what happened, Tawaddud says, and for a moment she does not want to. But Tawaddud coaxes and she feels so safe now, a part of her in the bird jar, a part of her in a warm body.
I lived on an island once, by the sea. I was good with patterns. I could see them in the clouds. I wove them into socks for my grandchildren. Then my hands ached and shook. I did not want to get so old. I gave my mind away. They sent me an uploading kit. I said goodbye to Angus, at his grave. I sat there and swallowed the pill and put the cold crown on my head. I thought maybe I would see him, on the other side. But my hands still ached, afterwards, for ever.
Ssh. Don’t think about that. Think about Alile.
I miss Alile.
I know. What was it like to be Alile?
I helped her see patterns in the desert, in the wind, in the wildcode. We found treasures. There are ghosts beneath the earth, you can dig them up if you know where to look. We loved to fly. We climbed into the rukh ship’s tackle. They shouted us to come back down, but we don’t care. Look at them below, how frightened they look, Velasquez and Zuweyla, all of them. They can’t see the lights beneath the desert’s skin, but we can, and the boy can. Look at the lights!
She lifts her hands, presses them against her eyes. Lights flash more as she presses harder. Look at them!
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