Djinn City, page 13
“You have none,” Dargoman said, “and thus no status in our world. I could kill you now without any fear of retaliation.”
“Oh please,” GU Sikkim said. “I’ve been dealing with Matteras for years. Do you think a cockroach like you can frighten me? I’m a Khan Rahman. This is my country. As you said earlier, you’re a servant just like me. The only difference is I like to keep my head down, whereas you seem to think you can lord it over everyone with emissary this and emissary that. Well, let me tell you, djinn don’t give a shit. They don’t care. They’ll cut your head off the same way they’d pluck a flower from the ground.”
“Enough, enough,” Dargoman said. “You’ll keep me here all night with your great wisdom. Tell me instead, how is it that this fresh nephew of yours is making so many waves, bandying Kaikobad’s name around? Matteras is most displeased.”
“He’s nothing, a wastrel, a loser,” GU Sikkim said. “Hasn’t done a day’s work in his life, never finished his studies, always drinking and chasing women. I know that his father paid through the nose sending him to university in three different countries. Is still paying. And he’s failed every job interview he’s ever taken.”
“He’s getting traction in the courts,” Dargoman said. “His application has not been thrown out.”
“That’s his mother,” GU Sikkim said. “She’s an ambitious harpy. Still, can’t make gold out of shit, is what I always say. Don’t worry about the boy, he calls me every day and asks permission before taking a piss.”
“He has made contact with Barabas nonetheless,” Dargoman said.
“Between you and me, Barabas is a fool,” GU Sikkim said, “a drunkard and a lecher.”
“Matteras will tolerate it if he stays at this level,” Dargoman said. “Make sure he does not go any further. Matteras wants the name of Kaikobad to be forgotten.”
“Any chance he’ll patronize my nephew?” GU Sikkim asked. “It would be nice to have an emissary in our ranks again. He’ll be a lot easier for me to control if I can get him something official.”
“Not a chance,” Dargoman said. “Matteras does not want his name associated in any way with the Khan Rahmans. In fact, he has half a mind to make your entire clan disappear. I have assured him that will not be necessary.”
GU Sikkim shuddered. “No, no, tell him I’ve got everything under control.”
“Sleep well, Sikkim.”
Indelbed wasn’t sleeping well. Rock wyrm snoring, he had discovered, was much worse than any other species of snoring. The snore started at a subsonic level and then traversed irregularly throughout the pitch and tone of human hearing, meandering in an unpredictable and highly irritating way, before ending in some dark energy spectrum, which caused Indelbed’s bones to twitch uncontrollably.
Givaras slept just fine. The wyrm, whom they had named God’s Eye, was now double the length and girth of his brethren. His physiology had changed measurably. The head was more pronounced, with more distinct features emerging. The eyes now blinked with worrying intelligence. Communication was possible through gestures and words, which the proto-dragon understood, although his own responses were a series of snorts and grunts. The mouth itself was still a horrendous collection of grinding teeth, although this too was elongating into a more serpentlike snout. Givaras’s speculation was that the dragons communicated telepathically, and anyway, they were such monstrous creatures—who would wish to talk to them in the first place?
Lately, God’s Eye had taken to hanging out with them in their little grotto. He was too big to easily fit into the tunnel network that crisscrossed the bedrock; already, he had passed a critical threshold. Wyrm hunting had evolved. Givaras had designed newer forms of sport. He had taught Indelbed how to make an invisible shield using the distortion field. This was materially different from keeping the light on. Thousands of hours of practice, however, had made Indelbed strong. The idea was to force the distortion field into a tight, solid sphere around God’s Eye, protecting him from any freak injuries. Givaras would then send out his frequency beam like a fisherman’s lure, the djinn having worked out perfectly the pitch most palatable to the rock wyrms.
The wyrms, unable to resist the bait, would come rushing into their cave, only to be ground up in the waiting maw of God’s Eye. God’s Eye quickly adapted to the hunt. He would position himself slightly off-center from the target tunnel and then shoot his head forward like a snake, catching the prey in his jaws. The jaws themselves were bigger now, big enough to snap a runty rock wyrm in half. Givaras, who was infatuated with God’s Eye, spent a lot of time studying his mouth and reported that the dragon was now developing different kinds of teeth, in anticipation of a different kind of prey, perhaps. Indelbed pointed out that the only other prey in this pit was the two of them.
Also there was a vastly exciting pair of stubs growing somewhere between the third and fourth carapace, which Givaras theorized might become the base of wings. Wings!
“Of course, such a creature could never hope to fly just on pure aerodynamics,” Givaras said. “Consider birds: they have sacrificed every ounce of excess weight, including a functioning brain, just to stay afloat. No, the dragons of yore were heavy creatures capable of great force and fierce intelligence. Their wings were for steering, perhaps. The real power must have come from their duality. Even now, God’s Eye might be preparing to grow those very same dark organs, which will one day allow him to take to the sky!”
“He’s working on some dark smells, I can testify to that,” Indelbed said.
“What was that?”
“He stinks. He farts nonstop, Givaras.”
“Well, if you’re going to be juvenile… you are, in fact, acting like a typical teenager.”
“Speaking of juveniles, you think this is only phase two of growth, right?”
“Yes, of course, the hinge of the jawline is nowhere near what you should see in a mature—”
“Well, do you have any idea what will happen once he does mature?” Indelbed asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean at what point can we, er, abort him?”
“Abort him?”
“Er, Givaras, he might get rather large at some unspecified future—”
“You mean kill him?” Givaras was outraged. “Hush… He’ll hear you…”
God’s Eye indeed was staring balefully at Indelbed and sneering with his slightly elongated snout.
“Just something you might consider.”
“Yes, well, if you’re going to have homicidal thoughts about killing off priceless extinct creatures of absolute wonder, then perhaps you’ve got a bit too much time on your hands,” Givaras said. “It is time we revisited your duties as my apprentice.”
“Apprentice?”
“Well, I realize we’ve never formalized the relationship, but you have been serving as such on an ad hoc basis, and we appear to have solved the problem of being eaten by rock wyrms—”
“Other than God’s Eye…”
“Other than God’s Eye, who is extremely slothful and has shown zero aggression toward us,” Givaras said. “In any case, I would formally like to anoint you as my client, and furthermore to upgrade such status to that of apprentice and master, with myself being the master of course—”
“Okay, I agree, what do I have to do? Clean your shoes? Haha.”
“A joke in extremely bad taste,” Givaras said. “I was thinking it’s time we worked on your distortion skills a bit.”
“I’ve kept the light on for like four years now.”
“Yes, very good, but outside of this cave, keeping on the light for years at a time will be absolutely useless.”
“Yes, probably you’re right. Unless it’s at night, and the electricity goes off. Then you fuckers will all be looking for me.”
“I’m thinking that when we actually emerge from this murder pit, the person who engineered our demise might be none too happy.”
“I thought he’s not allowed to harm us directly?”
“Kill us directly. He can harm us, all right. And it’s more of a guideline than a rule. If he’s sufficiently desperate, who knows? Plus he might have one of his clients do it for him. God knows how high his dignatas is now, he might well afford to flout the Lore. I’m going to teach you combat.”
“So you guys have some kind of karate?”
“Well, nothing that formal—djinns are notoriously hateful of discipline, you know. All that training and work and meditation isn’t really for us.”
“Yes, Master, I know.” Indelbed had taken over all the menial work long ago.
“Anyway, we do have a bill of rules, which I must tell you was ripped off completely by the Marquess of Queensberry, that rotten plagiarist. Dueling with the field. It’s a bit like fencing, I’m told. The idea is to push you around using my distortion field. Normally, we take turns attacking and defending.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Oh, djinn adolescents spend decades doing it. There are even tournaments and ladder matches,” Givaras said. “Now, first you must make yourself a shield. That’s easy, you just have to tighten your distortion field into a ball all around you and make it rigid.”
“All right.”
“Now see me pushing you? There are various attacks. I might try to spear through your field using a sharp pointy thrust. Or I could try to crush a part of you using brute pressure. Or I could even try rolling you back, which is possible if your shield is spherical. It’s quite funny to see…”
Indelbed, who was indeed rolling back, found his head lodged against an outcropping of rock and, being upside down, had the ignominy of vomiting all over his own face.
“Amateur mistake, really,” Givaras crowed. “Now if you were still able, it would be your turn to have a go at me.”
“You take turns?”
“Yes, it’s all very civilized. It’s meant to show off offense and defense turn-wise, see? Plenty of fellows just practice their attack and then lose the coin toss, and there you go: upended and vomiting after the first hit…”
“And you’re an expert at this?”
“Well, I have a remarkably weak distortion field, as I’ve informed you,” Givaras said. “Consequently, during my checkered youth, I was forced to endure a lot of bullying in the form of countless duels. It should not surprise you to know that the strongest do not always win in combat.”
“So basically you spent your childhood getting rolled around in a distortion ball.”
“Yes, in a nutshell,” Givaras said. “But I learned a valuable lesson, which I will impart to you if you are ready.”
“Although I have a very good idea what this lesson will impart, and quite possibly I can anticipate your words, I still basically have no choice and therefore will listen.”
“It’s remarkable,” Givaras said. “Just listen to you. Marvelous. My pedagogy has been wildly successful. You sound now like an educated young djinn with a litigious mind, whereas when you first entered this cave you could barely rub two words together.”
“Thanks.”
“In any case, back to the lesson. The first part of the wisdom is that patience is a key factor in duels. What I learned was that in most cases, when the assailant failed to damage me after his first few attempts, he quickly ran out of ideas as well as stamina, and essentially gave up trying to do any serious dismemberment, settling instead on some face-saving maneuver to achieve a points win.”
“You still lost.”
“Oh yes, my lack of offensive power ensured that, to this date, I have never won a competitive duel,” Givaras said with irritating complacency. “A record that I still hold and, ironically, has conferred on me dignatas, which even top-tier duelists would be proud of. At one point I became quite a draw in the leagues. There was a subculture of dueling that focused on various contenders trying to puncture my shield to deliver a knockout blow.”
“I don’t get it. You want me to become a subculture punching bag?”
“You’re missing the point,” Givaras said. “You are not going to face league matches. Your attacker will be trying to end your life. Almost certainly you will be overmatched in experience as well as strength. Your first task will be to avoid immediate destruction.”
“Oh, great.”
“The learning of which I will now expedite by mercilessly attacking you!”
“Gah! Stop! Stop!”
“Mock me, do you?” Givaras said. “Then let’s see how well you do upside down!”
Under the baleful gaze of God’s Eye, they were able to put in a solid half hour of practice—excruciatingly painful for Indelbed—before the random blasts of power drew the rock wyrms in sufficiently high numbers to make it prudent to stop. The wyrms were deterred by God’s Eye, but God’s Eye himself was not driven into a mindless frenzy anymore. He simply watched them with a predatory gaze, much like a cat looking at a couple of hamsters, trying to decide which one to eat first.
Givaras had mathematically worked out that at fairly subdued power levels, they could practice dueling for forty-minute intervals at a time without risking a massive convergence. A rest period of at least three hours was required afterward, to allow the juvenile wyrms time to settle down. This was great news for Indelbed, since it allowed time to heal his bruises, and he adopted a delaying strategy to try to avoid these windows of opportunity to pursue a form of “education,” which, for all intents and purposes, was simply a period of unmitigated pummeling at the hands of a laughing and sadistically bored djinn.
CHAPTER 17
Kaikobad
He stood again on a different tower, the abandoned home of Barkan, called Beltrex by his friends, the King of Mercury, who had left for parts unknown and never returned, yet another defection that rocked the city.
The gate was relentless. Despite his railing and pleading, his screams and tears, it showed him only the city and the countless stories of its butchers, cobblers, and artisans; of djinn smoking on balconies, perfumed air wafting into the canopy of great trees; of music coming from the towers where troubadours sang for lords and ladies and from the plays in the penny theater, the infamous jatra. But lately the mood had paled. The markets were empty, the birdsong stilled. He could smell smoke in the air, and there was a haze on the horizon, a smudging of the tree line, where Memmion camped with an army of humans, Nephilim, and djinn.
They said that Horus, known as Givaras the Maker, was behind him, his machinations the fuel for this vast rebellion. The High King sat closeted with the Society of Horologists, in their sealed catacomb beneath the King’s Tower, where they tinkered with time so that no one aged within that building, no food spoiled, and the grains of sand in the great hourglass would not fall. His people called for him, but he did not come out.
It was unthinkable. Citizens stared in disbelief toward the fields, which were abandoned and now burning, farms destroyed, the rice paddies ruined. War had come to Gangaridai. Kaikobad stepped off the tower and flew to the gate, reorienting himself over the barbican. For the first time in a thousand years, the bronze doors were closed, the portcullis lowered. The air reeked of magic.
The High Lords stood on the wall watching, djinn and Nephilim in their regal armor, bearing invested weapons as yet unused, many of them never blooded, for the peace of Gangaridai had held for a generation. Across the field, Memmion led from the front, as was his wont. There was no hiding him in the battlefield: he was the golden giant, with such brutal strength that if he reached the gate it was possible he could wrench the doors open with his bare hands. His great sword was the height of a man and a half, capable of cleaving Nephilim in two. The opposing lines faced each other, separated by a bare arrow shot, a moment of promise, a strange pause, as if Memmion himself was questioning the finality of this move, this total sundering of the First Empire. Behind him, his armies stretched back in ten lines, djinn of different ranks reinforced with Nephilim sorcerers and human infantry far outnumbering the defenders, enough men to encircle the city thrice. And behind them, Horus perhaps lurked, with Davala, and Barkan and his kin Elkran, and even mighty Bahamut, the traitor kings betraying Gangaridai in its time of need.
Yet the city was far from defenseless. The horn sounded, and Kuriken rode out on a white horse, his banner streaming behind him. He raised his lance in challenge, and the sun overhead turned his white armor aflame. For djinn, it was always primacy of self, every battle a duel, with a disdain for fighting chaff and a sacred duty to headhunt champions. Memmion was crafty. He did not answer. It was well known that while the sun shone, Kuriken was unbeatable. His armor could not be punctured. He was the solar warrior; his power waxed at noon. Kuriken sounded his horn again and then again, this time in mockery, shaming the many djinn before him.
Finally, a young prince of Lhasa came forward, unable to stomach the derision. He rode a gray horse and his lance bore the pennants of all the champions he had slain. He did not wait for pleasantries, merely lowered his head and charged, the destrier snorting with eagerness. His field expanded outward in a near-solid surface, pearlescent, and as his charge gathered momentum, it seemed as if a great jewel were rolling upon the plain.
Kuriken sat atop his horse, toying with the horn, his spear slack in his hand. A hundred yards, then fifty, then thirty, and finally he moved, letting the enemy field hit him, and it shattered, disintegrating into shards. The Prince of Lhasa stumbled, shocked, and Kuriken darted forward, reaching over his horse, his spear piercing low. The prince clutched his thigh and fell, blood spurting. On his knees, he struck with everything, aggressive till the end, fire jetting out from his hands like dragon flame, hotter than the sun, but once again his power failed against Kuriken’s bone-white armor, and the dull black spearhead, made of meteorite, caught the prince in the face, taking the top half of his head clean off. It was a stolid blow, a butcher’s minimal effort to split bone.
The body of the djinn twitched on the ground, spurting ichor, and the invading army flinched back. Duels between champions took days, often ending inconclusively. It was not easy to kill djinn. Kuriken stripped the Lhasa armor, fine filigreed scale, and held it aloft. His war cry was jarring.
