The Fractal Prince (23 page)

‘I always keep my promises, you know that—’

Don’t go there
.

‘Now is not the time to start getting cold feet. We had a deal, remember?’

As long as you keep your end of the bargain. By the way, the pellegrini says that there is quite a lot of unusual activity in the Gourd, too. The hsien-kus are up to something. And it’s hard to do this kind of thing discreetly. I may have to—

Suddenly, the voice of the ship is gone. I swear under my breath. But we have come too far to turn back now. I gesture again at Tawaddud. Another two hundred metres down. My body feels battered and aching. It’s like having a cold. When I instantiated it from the Gourd systems, I was not able to include any of the serious enhancements from the Sobornost body the pellegrini gave me – it’s still in stasis aboard
Perhonen
. And wildcode is making a serious mess of my innards. I’m hoping I can survive as long as it takes to get the job done.

And then I need my escape route to work, too.

Tawaddud yanks on the rope. Below us is what looks like a viewing gallery, unlit.

Just as I cut through its Sealed glass, my q-tool sputters and dies, changing shape. I swear and eject it with a yelp. It vanishes into the darkness below, twisting and sputtering like a firecracker as it goes.

‘Try this,’ Tawaddud says and hands me an old-fashioned tool: a diamond attached to a metal compass.

Diamonds are worthless in Sirr: children go and gather them from where the Sobornost ships fell during the Cry of Wrath. There is some pleasure in using what must have run a thousand Sobornost gogols as a sharp instrument for breaking and entering. After a few moments of work, I remove a circular disc of glass carefully, and we slip in.

It is a palace under construction, empty and quiet. Tawaddud leads us through it, to a ledge that overhangs a vertical drop that goes all the way down to the bottom of the Shard, a yawning pit lined with jinn wires.

‘How are we going to get down there?’ I ask.

Tawaddud gives me a serious look. ‘Do you trust me, Lord Sumanguru?’

Her eyes are dark and beautiful in the night. She has been through a lot. Like me, she escaped a prison and ended up back in one. She is chasing something that will always escape her. She wants to do the right thing.

The ship is right. I’m going to let her down.

Do what you do best
.

So I nod slowly and smile.

‘Then give me your hand.’

She squeezes my fingers in a surprisingly strong grip. Then she steps into the abyss, pulling me along with her.

I let out a scream and try to grab hold of something, but it is too late. We plummet down into the blackness. I hear Tawaddud laughing. Suddenly, there is an amber shimmering around us, and the fall becomes a gentle descent.

‘An angelnet,’ I breathe.

Tawaddud floats next to me and waves.

‘Yes!’ she laughs. ‘Only the Ugarte Shard still has a fully functioning one. That’s where the richest gogol merchants live. But here, you have to know where to look.’

I close my eyes as we fall, carried by the ancient guardian angels of Sirr-in-the-sky, and keep them shut all the way down.

After the descent, they take the last tram to the base of the Uzeda Shard.

Tawaddud stands opposite Sumanguru, holding on to a handlebar. The city lights glint in his athar glasses, reflections dancing to the rhythm of the rails. He has chosen round, blue ones that match the colours of the mutalibun gear.

‘This broken spimescape of yours hurts my eyes,’ he says, ‘but I think we are being followed.’

Tawaddud looks past him and curses under her breath. There are three jinni following them, colourful serpents made from polygons, swirling amongst the people in the car, moving faster than a human could, riding the jinn wires above the train. Without thought-forms, they will see relatively little in the physical world – so what is needed is a disguise in the athar.

Tawaddud picks out a couple on the train, a slight woman gesturing animatedly at her partner, talking about a new jinn jar for their servant. Under her breath, she whispers the Secret Name of Al-Musawwir, the Fashioner of Forms, duplicating her own shape and that of Sumanguru in the athar, overlaying them on the couple. Then she waits, and sure enough, when the couple gets off at the next stop, two of the jinni follow them, leaving the third one lingering behind. After a few moments, it darts away too.

‘Smooth,’ Sumanguru says.

The only Sirr fragment not completely built up, the Uzeda Shard is covered in scaffoldings and plastic sheets, a sign of ongoing construction projects to repair the damage of a great wildcode infection two years ago. Tawaddud remembers the great structures that suddenly sprang into being, a wildcode thing brought from the desert by a contaminated soul train, a tree of sapphire climbing up the shard. It grew so fast you could see it, a whirlpool of wild jinni around it in the athar.

As they get closer to the dark skeleton in the horizon, her heart beats faster.
Duny. Duny. I am doing the right thing. Father must know the truth
. She thinks about the long nights of guilt, of the feeling that something was wrong.
Maybe it was her all along. She wanted me to feel small so I would stay out of her way
.

She squeezes the Sobornost mind-bullet in her pocket.
It will emulate a part of your brain, the part the fragment will enter
, Sumanguru said.
It’s like a jinn jar, except that he can’t get out
. Such a small thing, cool metal, the size of her fingertip.

She tries to think about Kafur’s calm voice, how he took her in after the City of the Dead.
He is going to help. It is going to be all right
. Kafur taught her that everything heals.

There are great differences in altitude here, sudden sharp drops beneath the elevated tram rails and yawning vertical alleys that go up to the Shard. She looks down at the Great Northern Station where the infection started. The long low halls and arcs still bear the marks of the battle the muhtasibs and Repentants fought to contain the infection, scarred ribs of metal and glass.

Even if it takes a while for the scars to disappear
.

They get off at the last stop, squeezing past wirers and workmen returning from late shifts at the sites. Tawaddud leads them down a winding stairway into the lower levels. There are no signs of Repentants, and the athar here is so sparse and broken that it would be difficult for the jinni to track them anyway. Duny must be seething with rage somewhere.

There are glowing signs in the arches that appear as they enter the remains of the Northern Station. The rattle of trams above makes it difficult to speak. There is a smell of ozone everywhere, and the air tastes thick. An old soul train tunnel opens before them suddenly like the pupil of a giant eye.

Inside, the ground is uneven, and Tawaddud almost cuts herself on the diamond rail. In the distance, there are rumblings and mutterings. The Banu Sasan whisper that the wildcode creature was not completely defeated, that its children still live in the ruins.

‘When you mentioned palaces,’ Sumanguru says, ‘this is not exactly what I had in mind.’

‘Ssh,’ Tawaddud says. Ahead, there is a glowing sign on the wall, a simple circle, with two dots for eyes. A face. Tawaddud speaks the Name Kafur taught her, long ago, and a door opens, revealing a long corridor dimly lit with red light, echoing with distant music and whispers.

Tawaddud gives Sumanguru a white mask and puts one over her own face.

‘Welcome to the Palace of Stories.’

The Palace has changed, as it always does. It is a labyrinth of dimly lit passages that suddenly expand into rooms when you turn a corner.

There is a room with huge white walls on which shadows dance even if there is no apparent source of light, spiky-haired, long-limbed blots of ink that flee when Tawaddud tries to touch them. Another huge hall is criss-crossed by copper wires and hums with static electricity, making her feel heavy as if before a thunderstorm, her hair standing up, crackling. There is a gallery with walls of dark velvet, with thousands of candles burning in the ceiling, upside down, following the gestures of a man wearing a black suit and white gloves and a ballet dancer’s skirt, a slow dance of light and flame. The athar is thick with jinni weaving illusions.

A delicate woman with boyish dark hair, with a red mask instead of white, approaches them and gives a slight bow.

‘You look like you have never been to the Palace before,’ she tells Sumanguru. ‘How may we serve you? What is your pleasure? Bodies for jinni, stories for flesh.’ She looks the Sobornost gogol up and down, one hand on her hip, stroking her lips with a finger. ‘Lord Shoulders here could enjoy cinema, perhaps, or detective stories. As for you—’ She blinks. ‘Tawaddud?’

‘Emina.’ Tawaddud smiles beneath her mask. ‘I am here to see Kafur.’

Emina grabs her arm and pulls her through a velvet curtain, to a small bare-walled chamber.

‘You have some nerve to come here, you little bitch,’ she hisses.

‘Emina, I—’

‘When the Repentants came for you, we had to run and hide. I went to the City of the Dead. I was a ghul for a while. Do you know what that’s like? Of course not, Miss Tawaddud who came to play at being an embodiment slave, until the fun was over and it was time to go back to Daddy.’ She throws her hands into the air in disgust.

‘And who is this? A new plaything? He smells of Sobornost. We have masrurs here, you know. But why would you care about that, living in your palace now?’

‘It wasn’t like that. Please listen to me.’

Emina takes a sobbing breath. ‘Of course it was. Silly girl. Go away now. Shoo.’ She wipes her eyes and waves towards the corridor.

‘Emina, please. I need Kafur’s help. I’m looking for the Axolotl. I have sobors, I can pay—’

Emina looks at her sideways. ‘So. The Axolotl. Finally. Tired of the limp-dicked mutalibun lords, eh?’ She crosses her arms. ‘Tell me, is it another game of pretend, or something more?’

Tears well up in Tawaddud’s eyes.

‘It is something more,’ she whispers. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve.

Emina looks at her for a moment. Then she gives her a hug.

‘There, there, Tawa, it’s all right. You look terrible. Don’t make it worse. Aunt Emina will sort it out. I will take you to Kafur, and if that silly man does not help you, he’ll answer to me.’

She pats Tawaddud’s back. ‘The Axolotl has been here, but not for a while. They say he has been running with the masrurs, attacking soul trains, fighting Sobornost.’ She gives Sumanguru a dark look. ‘You should be careful of the company you keep.’

‘Emina, I’m . . . I’m sorry about what happened. I did not want to cause trouble for anybody. This was a good place for me. Please tell Zuweyla and Marjana and Ghanim and everybody that—’

Emina’s eyes sparkle. ‘Don’t you worry about that. You just needed a spanking, that’s all. We all want the story of the jinn prince, and if you found yours, all the better. Now come on - let’s go find Kafur.’ She frowns. ‘He has changed a bit since you last saw him.’

Kafur receives them in a cavernous space, sitting cross-legged on the floor under a railway arch – they must be somewhere below the Station. Kafur wears a familiar long-sleeved, hooded robe, but is more crooked and twisted than Tawaddud remembers. His face is hidden behind a red mask. He is flanked by the two jinn thought-forms in forbidden female shapes, one with naked flesh of glittering, silvery snake scales, the other a slender sculpture of ice.

I have been away a long time
, Tawaddud thinks.

‘Come closer,’ Kafur says. His voice has changed, too: it is higher, trilling, mixed with the sound of bells, not a human voice at all. ‘I never thought I would see you again. Such a beautiful self-loop. Come closer.’

There are pillows on the ground in a semicircle before Kafur. Tawaddud kneels on one of them.

‘Master, I come asking for a boon,’ she says.

‘A boon? Tawaddud, who now lives in the world of palaces and high muhtasib lords and the mighty Sobornost, comes back to the world of stories and secrets, and the first thing she asks Kafur is a boon? Do you not have a kiss for me, for old times’ sake?’

Kafur pulls back his hood and removes his mask. ‘Even if wildcode has not been kind to me. No one escapes the Destroyer of Delights.’

His face is a bloated, fungus-like mass, purple and blue, with yawning openings in his cheeks, running with pale fluids. Tiny things move and chitter in his empty eyesockets: chimera insects with iridescent shells that dart in and out of the crevices and creep across the ruin of Kafur’s visage. He touches the black wound where his lips used to be with an embroidered sleeve. Tawaddud’s stomach turns.

‘So, what do you say? You can close your eyes if you wish.’

Sumanguru gets up, raising a fist. ‘Maybe
I’ll
give you a kiss,’ he growls.

Tawaddud lays a hand on his arm.

‘The Palace is his,’ she says calmly. ‘I will pay his price.’

‘I cannot accept that.’

‘I would have thought you did not care much for what the flesh does with flesh.’

‘This is different,’ Sumanguru says, staring at Kafur.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Tawaddud says, and speaks the Secret Name of Al-Jabbar, the Irresistible.

It is possible to entwine forcibly, especially with a jinn. It is one of the forbidden things, but she is too angry to think about the consequences. She binds the serpent jinn woman’s self-loop into her own with the Name. Then she kisses Kafur as the jinn woman, tongue turning into foglets, fire and poison, sucking air out of his lungs until he is left sputtering and gasping.

When she pulls back and wipes her own lips with the back of her hand, the jinn thought-form lets out an angry scream and evaporates into thin air. The forced entwinement brings a blinding headache, but she grits her teeth.

‘You really need to work on your stamina, Kafur, if you want to trade in kisses instead of stories,’ she says.

Kafur stares at her for a moment and bursts out laughing, a shrill, crickety sound. ‘A kiss to die for, I agree!’ He replaces his mask. ‘Now, what is it that you want from old Kafur, dear Tawaddud?’