by Myke Cole
And who are you?
I am Ninip, the thing said, intoning its name like a priest with a blood offering, and I am war.
There, again, the barest hint of fragrance. Sarah’s homemade perfume, maddeningly close, the origin masked by the confused darkness.
Sarah! he cried out. Patrick! He strained his mind, the same poor facsimile of hearing through which the presence spoke to him. If he was dead, maybe they were here with him. Maybe they could answer.
But it was Ninip’s voice he heard, the grating rasp of chains dragged over stone.
They are lost to you, the presence said, the tone suddenly crooning, sympathetic. He felt its touch again, warming now, a reassuring arm across his nonexistent shoulders. I am your family now.
Schweitzer shrugged the arm away. Bullshit. How the fuck do you know?
I know death, Ninip said. Soon, you will, too. For now, you must trust me.
The scumbags Schweitzer routinely operated against enjoyed kidnapping for ransom nearly as much as they did arms sales and blowing stuff up. The first rule of negotiation was always proof of life.
Bullshit, he said. Show me bodies.
He blinked into the darkness, or tried to. If he could smell Sarah’s perfume without a nose, then maybe he could see her without eyes.
You doubt the darkness. Ninip sounded tired. The new ones always do. You still cling to the tinctures of life. Very well. Look upon the world again, for all the joy it may bring you.
Schweitzer’s vision went from black to white. Sensation followed. His muscles locked, tensed over sturdy bones. His eyes blinked, and his nostrils flared. He lolled a dry tongue, thick in a parched mouth. He flexed fingers.
He could feel his body responding to the commands he sent it, but there was something wrong. All his senses came to him at a remove, as if he were hearing about the world thirdhand, a tale told by an expert narrator who, for all his skill, couldn’t capture the spirit of the thing.
Look, Ninip commanded.
Schweitzer blinked again. The whiteness flickered into static, then slowly began to resolve into color and depth.
He was lying on a metal table, surrounded by men with guns leveled at him.
He sat up, his torso rising effortlessly, no sensation of his abdominals engaging or his thighs flexing to compensate.
The presence stayed with him. The feeling of envelopment, of intrusion, didn’t fade in the least. Ninip’s being was so close to him that he imagined he could hear the thing breathing.
Inside him. Ninip was inside him, in his heart, in his head, in the atoms of his flesh.
They shared his body. Two souls in a single shape.
Am I possessed? His thoughts now gave voice inside his own mind, and Ninip heard and answered.
Some call it so, but they are fools. You are bonded. You are wed. You are better.
Schweitzer looked around the room.
It was a hospital, but secured like no hospital he’d ever seen. The room was windowless, about twenty feet across and bare save for a wheeled standing desk covered with computer equipment. The door looked to be made of solid steel, with locking bars that would make a bank vault look weak. To either side, tall red tanks stood, lines running to nozzles placed around the room, tiny blue pilot lights burning below them. A broad red button stood beneath a plastic flip-up shield beside the door.
Whoever built this place wanted to be able to burn whatever was inside at the touch of a button.
Soldiers surrounded the table, carbines leveled at Schweitzer’s head. They were kitted out for war, helmets, heavy body armor, grenades. One of them held a flamethrower, blue pilot flame flickering from the tip.
At their head stood an older man, wild white hair and whiskers giving him a reasonable likeness to Mark Twain. He wore an immaculate lab coat with a plastic badge clipped to the breast pocket. It showed only his face, the Department of Defense seal, and a single name: ELDREDGE.
The man scowled, frown deepening until his eyes positively blazed hatred. He hunched, fingers hooked into claws. Shadows danced between his legs and beneath his armpits, haloing him in curling black mist. The shadows cavorted around the soldiers’ boots, writhed about their weapon muzzles, dripping red at the edges, tinting all in blood.
The man said something, a barking sound, the coughing of an angry monkey, his teeth glinting wetly as his lips parted. The recesses of the room bent and wavered, fading in and out of focus, making Schweitzer doubt their stability. The table was a shelf beneath his buttocks and thighs, his feet dangling out over an abyss.
He looked down. A threadbare hospital gown flapped off him, tattered and filthy. The air vents hissed, rasping filthy gas into the room. Maybe poison.
This is the seen world, the felt world, Ninip said. It is not so pretty as you left it.
This isn’t the world, Schweitzer said. You’re a fucking liar.
And as he said it, so it was.
He felt his vision peel at the edges, the veneer lifting ever so slightly, until he could discern the filter, thinner than onionskin, draped over his senses.
There were two souls sharing his body, two sets of senses perceiving the world. This horrid landscape of foul smells and threatening visages was Ninip’s view. Schweitzer shuddered to think of a life lived on this brutal plain: every movement a threat, every sound a warning, every touch a blow.
He rebelled against the perception, reaching out with his spirit to peel away the layer that filtered his sense of the world.
He felt the presence dig in, tendrils chafing against his soul, clutching and pulling, struggling to hold on to its control over their shared perception. It battered his consciousness, closing their shared eyes, clenching their shared hands.
Stop, Ninip said. A comfortable lie is still a lie. I am showing you the truth. Do not exchange it for the duped sleep of the contented.
Schweitzer ignored it, chipped away, pushing back. At long last, he gave an inward shout, and the veneer fell away, the world coming into normal focus again.
The man in the white lab coat frowned down at him, but he did not scowl. The soldiers around him came into stark relief, the shadows gone, their uniforms familiar. The hospital gown was clean and blue. The air vents ran smooth and silent in the background, blowing sweet, clean air.
You are a fool, hissed Ninip, and you will reap a fool’s reward.
The man in the white coat leaned in close. “Can you hear me?” His voice was gentle.
Yes, Schweitzer responded, realized he was speaking internally to Ninip, that his lips hadn’t moved. Schweitzer struggled, sucking in air, forcing it down his windpipe, feeling his lungs inflate, puffing out inside his chest cavity, then forcing them to squeeze the air up and out again, choking the muscles of his throat down around the air as it pushed out of his mouth.
“Yes,” he said, recoiled at the thick croaking that came out, not even close to a human word.
The man’s eyebrows arched. “Very impressive. It takes most of our . . . new arrivals much longer to master even the rudiments of speech.”
Schweitzer felt sick panic, looked down, yanked up the hospital gown.
His stomach was whole, a long trail of sutures running a railroad-track pattern from just above his crotch to the base of his sternum.
His skin was hairless, the white-gray of a fish’s underbelly.
He flared his nostrils, smelled the stale, antiseptic odor of the room.
But the scents weren’t guided to him by his breath. He stilled himself, watched his torso.
He wasn’t breathing.
You have not been listening, Ninip said. You are with me now. We are a fortress. We are mighty, and together we shall have the gate of our enemies.
That’s nice, Schweitzer said. We’re also dead, aren’t we?
The memories flooded him. Patrick crumpling beneath a burn
ing door. Sarah falling backward through the air, a bullet chewing through her tender flesh, blood misting the room.
A pistol barrel jammed beneath his chin. We knocked on the right door, asshole.
An explosion. Darkness.
Schweitzer lowered his head.
He felt Ninip curl around him, could imagine the presence as a serpent coiling about his shoulders, forked tongue flicking in his ear. Grief subsided, anger heightened, rising until his muscles bunched.
We will avenge you, Ninip said. We will avenge your family. Our vengeance will be legend. Our enemies will sing of it for generations.
Schweitzer found himself leaning into the voice. The thought of vengeance sang in his soul. The fuckers who’d killed him, killed his family would pay. Somehow he’d cheated death. Maybe it was only to give him a second chance to make things right.
We have a new life together, Ninip whispered, and we will see the butcher’s bill paid in full.
Schweitzer raised his head, blinked again, met Eldredge’s eyes.
“You must have a lot of questions,” the man said as the soldiers around him slowly lowered their weapons. “Let me start with the first one. Moving isn’t living. Thinking isn’t living. You are dead, James Schweitzer.”
“How?” He exhaled.
Eldredge patted his shoulder. “It will take time to master speaking, and you’ll likely never be fully capable,” he said. “Pushing air over your vocal cords came naturally before. Now you have to force it.”
It wasn’t an answer. Frustration spiked, and Schweitzer clenched a hand on the stainless steel of the table’s edge.
And felt it crunch in his grip. He looked down to find the metal crumpled in his fist, balled like tissue paper below his dead, gray knuckles.
A mountain, Ninip crooned, a river in flood. We are mighty.
Schweitzer felt the power surging through him. The strength bunched in his muscles, coursed through his tendons. He looked back up at Eldredge, the man suddenly looking old, tiny, and frail. Schweitzer could break him in half with no effort, all he had to do was reach and . . .
He battered the lens aside. Ninip again. His seeing, his thoughts, his hungers.
Not so fast, Schweitzer said.
They are toys, Ninip said. They cannot harm us. They are made to be our slaves.
They are people, Schweitzer said, and we’re not enslaving anyone. That went out of style a long time ago.
He felt Ninip’s sigh. My grandfather told me that repetition can teach even the donkey. I will repeat the lessons until you learn.
Good luck with that, Schweitzer said, straining against Ninip’s influence. The eagerness to test his newfound strength on Eldredge didn’t abate, but he managed to hold it in check, surging just below his skin, making his fingers twitch.
“How?” he managed again.
“Well,” Eldredge said, shrugging. “Honestly? Magic.”
The older man stepped aside. Behind him stood another man, thick beard neatly trimmed, dark eyes regarding Schweitzer with open curiosity. He wore the long shirt-robe and baggy trousers common to the hill tribesmen in the lawless steppe around Afghanistan and Iran. He was thin, his head looking too big for his shoulders. A small kufi capped his wild shock of black, tightly curling hair.
The air around him shimmered, swirled, as if some barely visible river coursed about him. Schweitzer shook his head, but it was not Ninip’s influence this time. Whatever he was seeing was true to the man before him. Eldredge paid it no notice; nor did any of the soldiers.
“This,” Eldredge said, “is Jawid Rahimi. He is . . . well . . . he is a Sorcerer, and he has raised you from the dead.”
Hello. Jawid’s voice echoed in Schweitzer’s mind, penetrating into the space that he shared with Ninip. Hello to both of you.
It was the language of Jawid’s thoughts. Schweitzer could hear the Pashto beneath, the slow and painstaking translation into the halting English that reached him. It was like listening to two men, one talking slowly after the other.
Jawid did not share the space with Ninip and Schweitzer, merely spoke into it, but Schweitzer could sense the channel that connected them, could see the swirling current about the Sorcerer focusing forward toward him.
This one is strong, Ninip said to Jawid. You have done well.
Jawid said nothing, but Schweitzer could feel the Sorcerer’s fear at Ninip’s words, felt him withdraw slightly, drawing back up the channel he had created.
Sarah and Patrick, Schweitzer said hurriedly. Where are my wife and son?
They are meat, Ninip snarled, and we are steel.
Fuck off. Where the fuck are they?
You mewl and whine like a kitten, Ninip answered. You cry for milk and your mother. You are with me now. We are a storm.
Jesus, give it a rest. Jawid, what happened to my family?
He knew the answer before Jawid gave it, could feel it in the Sorcerer’s link to he and Ninip. They . . . they did not survive. I am sorry.
Though Schweitzer had known this, had seen it, the grief still came anew. He lowered their shared head, cradling their head in their hands, the emotion setting their shoulders shaking, physical motions performed out of habit. They had no tears, their shared cheeks would not redden.
Disgusting, Ninip said. They are better off, beyond the bags of flesh that held them prisoner.
Where? Schweitzer asked. Where are they now? Are they in heaven?
I don’t know, Jawid answered. I only found Ninip.
Where did you find him? Schweitzer shouted. Maybe they’re in the same place! Send me back there?
I cannot. I . . .
Jawid is a fool, Ninip said. An ignorant goatherd who cannot spell his own name.
Shut the hell up, you don’t . . .
No . . . Jawid cut in, he is right. I cannot read and write, and I am not good at stories. I will show you.
Schweitzer’s vision blotted out, his mind swept along the current of Jawid’s magic, drowning even Ninip’s curses. His vision returned to the grainy static, flickering and wavering, the colors finally running together into unbroken white.
Slowly, the field dissolved, a scene resolving beneath it.
A little boy, shivering beside a goat path, scrawny, filthy, arms wrapped around his knees. Behind him, a hut of scavenged wood, plastic sheeting, and corrugated metal has been ransacked, set alight. There are corpses among the wreckage, the boy’s family.
It’s you, Schweitzer said.
Yes, Jawid answered. My father was proud. He would not pay the warlord for the privilege of herding in our own ancestral range. They left me to starve. How could a little boy survive in the hills that ground the Russians and the Americans both to powder?
The little boy standing, tears streaking clean trails through the dirt covering his face. The air beginning to eddy around him, shimmering, visible only to him. The little boy crying out to the world beyond, reaching for his family.
And finding something else.
A hand stretched out from the afterlife, grasping his own, hungry for life, following the sound of his voice back into the land of the living.
My grandmother told me of the jinn, Jawid said. I put the first one in a stone and carried it with me. It made me run faster than the wind. Fast enough to hunt hares on my own.
The boy, face red with blood, sheltering under an overhanging rock, chewing hungrily on the body of a rabbit.
That was how they found me. Hard men with eyes like flint, dirty white turbans trailing over Russian military fatigues. They carry guns, grenade launchers. They kneel before the boy, offer him food, their eyes crawl over him with a hunger that made Schweitzer recoil.
What could I do? I was a child. I wanted nothing more than a family again.
The boy, eyes kohled and lips rouged, dressed in a woman’s gown, sitting in
the lap of one of the hard men, a finger idly stroking his hair.
Abdul-Razaq told me he loved me, and I told him of my jinn-in-a-stone. Some of the Talebs wanted to kill me, but others saw the power in what I could do, they made me reach out again and again. I made amulets, talismans. The jinn made the Talebs strong, or swift, or able to see in darkness. It made our little band mighty. Until . . .
A gun battle. The boy shivering again, from fear this time, hiding behind a boulder as explosions sound around him.
One of the Talebs leaping over him, the amulet about his neck sending him fifty feet in the air. The sniper takes him anyway, the huge round nearly severing his head.
American soldiers. Special Forces by their gear, surrounding the boy. One of them kneels, takes the boy’s shoulders, speaks gently. He knows what the boy can do. They have gotten it from a captive Taleb.
The rear hatch of a C-130 slowly closing. A female medic smiles at the boy, checking him for lice, giving him shots, antibiotics. The shudder as the huge plane takes off, the bumpy ride through the long hours before the hatch lowers again, the light of the American sky flooding in.
They have given me a home, here. I still bring the jinn, but now . . .
. . . I am the amulet, Schweitzer finished for him. My body.
Schweitzer’s vision went white again as Jawid’s magic withdrew, then resolved back to the room, Eldredge looking at Jawid, his brow furrowed with worry.
“No problem,” Jawid said to Eldredge in heavily accented English. “I am telling him how he came to be.”
“Ah.” Eldredge turned back to Schweitzer. “So, there it is.”
That’s what you are, Schweitzer said to Ninip. One of these jinn.
A goatherd’s name for a thing he cannot understand. I was a god and king both, in my time. It pleases me to live again.
Sarah, Patrick. The images flashed through his mind, a bullet knocking his wife back into the wreckage, the burning door covering his son. The thought of this unlife without her . . . He didn’t think she’d like this existence, but he was powerless before the impulse, so strong it blotted out even Ninip’s presence for a moment. If there was even a chance that he could see her, could talk to her . . .
