The Fractal Prince (28 page)

Then Stanka comes at her from the ruins of the train.

A swipe of a diamond-clawed paw throws Mieli aside like a rag doll and tears one of her wings into tatters. Then the ursomorph is upon her, pinning her down, enhanced teeth going for her throat. Her q-enhanced muscles scream as she gets her legs beneath the bear woman’s bulk and kicks as hard as she can. There is a surprised look in the ursomorph’s eyes as she flies into the air.

Mieli rolls, grabs the multipurpose cannon, squeezes the trigger, praying. The weapon gives her one more shot. An x-ray laser blast takes off half the bear’s torso, and the rest rains down on top of her.

And then the rukh ships and the Teddy Bears are there, driving away the storm.

The mercenary camp is a cluster of muhtasib-sealed temporary bubble buildings between the Wrath area and the Wall, a few kilometres from Sirr. On the evening of the battle of the train, Mieli is taken to see the commander. Odyne is a skeletally thin woman from the Belt, living in a medusa-like exoskeleton, made bulky by the thick layers of Sealed material around it. Her narrow face inside the globe-like helmet makes Mieli think of the fish in Grandmother’s spherical lake in Oort.

Odyne is sitting with a middle-aged portly man in lavish Sirr robes and rises to greet Mieli when she enters. A heavily armoured mercenary in mutalibun robes stands on guard behind them.

‘Please. Sit,’ Odyne says.

Mieli has been through extensive debugging by the company’s combat muhtasib, and her skin is still tingling. Odyne looks at her, tendril-fingers knotting together.

‘You have done well, Mieli,’ she says. ‘In fact, well enough that I would like to introduce you to our employer. This is Lord Salih of the House Soarez.’

The man acknowledges Mieli’s presence with a barely perceptible nod.

‘My thanks,’ he says in a flippant tone. ‘I understand that you played an important role in protecting my property. A warrior woman, how remarkable. My mother would approve.’

‘A comrade died for your property. A truedeath: backups do not work here,’ Mieli says. ‘She left cubs behind. I’m sure they would appreciate your gratitude more than me.’
When this is over, I’m going to make sure they are all right
, she thinks.

Odyne waves. ‘Yes, yes, that is very noble of you, Mieli. The Company protects its own, have no fear, and Lord Salih has been very generous. However, there is another reason I have asked him here today.’

Salih raises his eyebrows.

‘I regret to inform you that our arrangement is coming to an end,’ Odyne says.

‘What?’ Salih sputters. ‘You are in breach of contract!’

Odyne sighs. ‘As it happens, we have reason to believe that the business we are presently engaged in will cease to be profitable in a very short amount of time. You’ll recall that our contract includes protecting your own person from any harm that might befall you or Sirr, from the desert
or
Sobornost. You may be surprised that, strictly interpreted, this dictates some drastic actions from our part. Mieli, please kill Lord Salih and make sure you thoroughly destroy his brain.’

Mieli hesitates. It is a dishonourable thing to do. But the Mieli she has become here would not hesitate, and this is a man who trades in gogols—

Lord Salih’s head disappears in a burst of flame.

‘Too slow,’ Odyne says, a zoku q-gun floating next to her head. ‘You will have to be faster in the service of our new employer.’

‘Dear Odyne, you will excuse me if I regard hesitating before executing her employer a positive quality,’ says the mercenary, drawing her hood back. A brass eye stares at Mieli. ‘You will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your talents where we are going.’

‘Mieli is one of my finest warriors,’ Odyne says. ‘Although she does seem to be having an off day.’

‘I am Abu Nuwas,’ the man with the brass eye says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

The mercenaries sail over the wildcode desert in rukh ships, huge vessels kept aloft by swarms upon swarms of the chimera birds in vast blue clouds. The Teddy Bears have been joined by at least ten other companies, and the posthuman warriors carried by the vessels number in the thousands.

Some of them fly under their own power, in gliders and other analog craft custom-made to survive the hardships of the desert. Abu Nuwas’s two flagship galleons,
Munkar
and
Nakir
, are surrounded by a halo of Fast Ones. Their shadows race below them in the desert as the sun sets.

Mieli stands on the bridge of
Nakir
with Odyne, Nuwas and the other mercenary commanders. The lights of the Fast Cities dance in the distance, and the surface of the dark sea that used to be the Mediterranean has an eerie green sheen. They have lost a few craft already to sudden jinn storms, driven away by Nuwas’s muhtasibs, but the fleet pushes forward.

Mieli
? comes
Perhonen
’s voice suddenly.

Thank Kuutar
, Mieli whispers.
Where have you been
?

In touch with the thief. He knows how to get to the jannah. But so does a man called Abu Nuwas
.

The ship fills Mieli in on the thief’s activities in Sirr. A conflict with hsien-kus and and the local authorities, and getting a girl into trouble.
Why am I not surprised
?

He thought you were going to be in a position to—

I am really going to kill him this time
, Mieli says.
Abu Nuwas has a whole damned army. It’s not like I can just slip into the jannah he digs up unnoticed and get our gogol
.

He said you would be pissed off
.

Well, he was right. Bastard
.

Apparently, he got the other thing he needed from Sirr. It’s up to you now, he says
.

Mieli sighs.
Of course it is. Can you get me any imagery of this region
?

It’s all pretty weird over there. On Old Earth, you would have been flying over Turkey now. Lots of good places there to bury something
.

Whatever it is, it’s not going to stay buried for long
, Mieli says.

What are you going to do? I’m sorry about this, Mieli, I wish I could do more to help. I’m in touch with the pellegrini, she has been doing something in the Gourd—

Mieli swears. This is not what was supposed to happen. The thief was not supposed to get involved in local politics, he just needed to get the location of the jannah. It was going to be a matter of sneaking away from her unit, retrieving the gogol and and transmitting it up to
Perhonen
.

Let me talk to him
, Mieli says.

I hate to admit it, Mieli, but this did not go as well as I expected
, the thief says.
I was outmanoeuvred by a one-eyed merchant. If you think the situation down there is too difficult, perhaps we can cut our losses. It might be possible to use what I got, to get into Chen’s mind more directly—

But you would still need the Founder codes for that
.

Yes, I suppose so
, the thief says.
And we don’t have much time. It sounds like there is going to be a straight-out war between the hsien-kus, vasilevs and the pellegrini sometime soon
.

War
, Mieli says.

Damn
, the thief breathes.
I’m just seeing your feed now. You would need a whole army to get to the jannah now. Leave it, Mieli. It was my fault, I screwed up. We’ll find another way
.

An army
, she whispers.

What are you talking about
? the thief asks.

Mieli ignores him, closes her eyes and prays to the pellegrini.

25

TAWADDUD AND THE COUNCIL

The next day, before they bring her before the Council, Dunyazad comes to see her in her cell, a tiny cube-shaped room, where the air is hot and thick with Repentants. Before Duny enters, she stands at the door and watches her for a long time. She is formally dressed in a Gomelez muhtasib robe, dark cloth embroidered with Secret Names. But to Tawaddud’s surprise, she is not wearing her qarin jinn jar around her neck.

‘Do you know why I became a muhtasib?’ Duny says.

Tawaddud says nothing.

‘Because I wanted to protect you from this.’ Duny speaks a Secret Name, and then Tawaddud is in her sister’s head.

She watches the city from her tower. This is the first duty of the muhtasib, always: the other Sirr where the jinni live, watching the flow of Seals and sobors, listening to the pulse and the breath of the city in the athar. Nieve is there with her, of course, painting the night city for her stroke by stroke, whispering to Repentants who bring her information, racing along wires and patches of athar untainted by wildcode, to show Duny the shadow of reality.

After a night spent in the tower she always feels like the Other City is the real city: this is where she adjusts things, reaching into its virtual image, touching a node, feeling it in her grasp, between the fingers of Duny/Nieve, embodied both in the shadow and the flesh.

She thinks about Tawaddud and her love of monsters, of things she does not understand, wonders if her sister understands the monstrosity of the muhtasib and their dual nature. One part rooted in the brain, the self-loop that remembers the games she played with her sister up on the Wall, and the Nieve part, the part she carries in the bottle around her neck, the soul that races through the night and yearns for a body.

Her father gave her to the entwiner when she was seven. Too old, the man said, stroking his beard. Why now? It will never take root.

Her father’s hands rested heavily on the man’s shoulders, jinn rings pressing into the flesh of his neck. She is a Gomelez, her father said. She must have a qarin. His voice had a trace of anger that echoed with the fights he had had with her mother. Duny would sneak in to listen when they fought, using the words Chaeremon had taught to make her silent. Tawaddud slept all the way through it, always.

A few more months, her mother said that night. I cannot let them go yet.

It is time, her father said. It is already too late. He paused. Perhaps one would be enough. Can you choose?

How can I choose?

Foolish woman. The qarin is not a thing of evil. It is a sign of glory, of power, a new soul. It gives you strength to serve the city.

But there is more to it, her mother said. It changes you, they say. I have seen you with Chaeremon. You become different.

I’ll do it, Dunyazad said.

Her parents looked at her.

My mouse, my flower, you do not know what you are saying, her mother said. You should go back to bed. Mother and Father are talking.

I heard what you said. I want to do it.

Her father looked at her seriously, with dark eyes that he got when thinking deeply. Then maybe the decision is made for us, he said.

Nieve the jinn comes back to her like a touch of the chill, and she is again a different being, the one who feels the ragged fragments of wildcode in the athar, a mind extended into the foglets of the air, the cool shell of the Seal in her own cells. She is not just Dunyazad the child, but a cloud of fireflies around her, and the memory feels foolish, suddenly. This is where she belongs, this is why her father brought them together, this is why the entwiner made her temples burn with the helmet on her head, made her dream of Nieve, made Nieve dream of Dunyazad.

How did she ever doubt that it was right?

‘It is not always right,’ Dunyazad says. She holds her jinn jar in her hand.

‘I never knew,’ Tawaddud says slowly. ‘Why tell me now?’

‘Because they are going to throw you off the top of the Shard and Father is going to go along with it, to get his precious vote through. Even when there are alternatives.’

‘The zoku,’ Tawaddud says.

‘Yes. I can see you have been talking to Sumanguru, or whatever his name really is.’

‘Why them?’

‘Because I don’t
like
who I am with Nieve. It wasn’t like with your Axolotl. We are all monsters, Tawaddud, us muhtasibs. They graft us and jinni together and make new beings and do not care what it does to us. I want to find a different way. I hoped you would understand, that I could get you out of your shell, to help me. Instead, you embraced the madness of your Axolotl and became a killer.’

Tawaddud shakes her head. ‘It’s not like that.’ She tells her sister the story of Sumanguru, and Abu Nuwas, and what they discovered. Duny listens carefully.

‘So, if Abu Nuwas reaches the jannah, none of it matters anymore,’ Tawaddud says. ‘The hsien-ku will stop playing nice. It will be a Cry of Wrath times ten. And this time, they will win.’

‘I believe you,’ Duny says. ‘You are a beautiful liar, but you have never been able to lie to me.’

‘So, what are we going to do?’

‘This could play in our favour. This could give me the leverage to propose an alliance with Supra City, to get a zoku embassy established here. But we need proof. Otherwise, they will never believe us. Nuwas is far too influential. Is there any way to link him to the murders?’

‘The Axolotl did not know how it was done. He gave Nuwas his story, and then he woke up in Alile’s mind. No one would listen to him anyway.’ Tawaddud squeezes her temples. ‘I wish I could
show
them.’

‘No one would accept an entwined testimony either, not with the Axolotl involved. And it’s just too perfect, with you as the scapegoat. The black sheep of the Gomelez family who has been working with the Devil himself, to bring down Sobornost and all that it represents, because her mother died in the Cry of Wrath.’ Duny pauses. ‘The bastards could not have planned it better. But it’s not all lost. I can get you out of here. I have contacts—’

‘I need to try, Duny. I need to testify.’

‘All right,’ she says and embraces her, long and hard. ‘I will be there, too. I will speak for you. Perhaps it will be enough.’

The Great Observatory sits on top of the Blue Shard, above its waterfalls and palaces and muhtasib buildings with their azure walls. It is a lenticular structure held aloft by arches that rise from the top of the Shard and bow towards the city. Tawaddud has never been there. The carpet guides Tawaddud, Duny and their Repentant guards to a modest entrance on the building’s upper surface.