Djinn City, page 14
Memmion did not wait for any more challenges. He sounded his horn, and his army lurched forward, furious with shame. The war had begun. Kaikobad breathed in the copper taste of blood and let the chaos take him.
CHAPTER 18
Enter the Squid
“Really? This is where you live now?” Maria, his semi-girlfriend of the past year, was over at Rais’s new place for the first time. It had taken a lot of effort to get her out of the tristate area. She was not impressed.
They had grown up together, on and off—family friends, then an abortive summer fling at fifteen; drinking wine filched from their parents, sneaking joints out on balconies—and he found somewhere along the way that she had grown up to be really hot.
“It’s not that bad,” Rais said. He couldn’t quite put his heart into it. It really was pretty bad. The furniture was shabby. There was also a damp smell he couldn’t get rid of. Even the wall fixtures gave off a dejected yellow light that, far from brightening the room, only seemed to highlight the deficiencies.
“Rais, baby, I think you should move back into your mom’s house,” Maria said. She was standing at the edge of the living room, not quite wanting to commit to a seat.
“I can’t. Don’t worry, it’s only for a while,” Rais said. Having treated her with a casual droit de seigneur the past few years, he was now shocked to find that he wasn’t quite prepared to accept the look on her face.
“Look, you’ve obviously got a lot going on,” Maria said. “So I’m just going to go, let you get organized.”
“Wait, wait, just sit,” Rais said. He felt like a fool. “Drink?”
“No, Rais, it’s not even noon,” Maria said.
“Joint?”
“No.”
“Sorry I dragged you over then,” Rais said, lighting one for himself, trying to fake his normal insouciance. He felt like a child talking to an adult.
“Rais, babe, I was going to do this over Facebook, but I’m probably going to keep running into you for the rest of my life, so I thought I’d come over.”
“You’re pregnant?” he joked, knowing where this was going.
“Ew, no,” Maria said. “I’m moving to Chicago.”
“What?”
“I’m getting married. He’s an engineer. He lives there.”
“Married?”
“His father is a friend of my dad’s. They kept sending proposals,” Maria said.
“And you accepted? You haven’t even met the guy.”
“Don’t be silly, of course I’ve met him. He flew down to see us last month.”
“You never said anything.”
“You were busy,” Maria said. She lit a cigarette, took a long drag. “It was just for fun, you and I, Rais. It wasn’t ever going to go anywhere. I think we both knew that.”
“I didn’t know that,” Rais said. “I guess I do now.”
“Oh, Rais, don’t act the victim, please,” Maria said. “You of all people should let this go gracefully.”
“Well, Maria love, it’s not every day girls leave me for engineers,” Rais said.
“I need to get my life started,” Maria said. “And I don’t think you’re heading in the same direction. I’ve really got to go. Mom’s waiting at home. See you around.”
She bent over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek, before retreating into the little foyer and out to the elevator, trying not to touch anything, not sparing a further glance back. Rais, shell-shocked, could only finish his joint in silence.
There was to be a lot of silent pot smoking over the next fortnight.
Up until this point of his life, Rais had had things rather easy. He was conscious of it now. Hitherto his real greatest complaint had been boredom, an ineffable dissatisfaction with life and a sense that momentous or at least interesting things were passing him by. He had never been able to muster the passion for deal making, or scamming, or politicking, or even the simple grinding out of wealth that seemed to move most of his friends. His disengagement had come with a smug superiority, a faux sense of philosophical accomplishment and empty intellectualism, fueled by a kind of dabbling in various subjects without ever really committing. He was a writer who had never written a book, a historian with no papers to his name, a great traveler who had never really penetrated the secrets of the places he had scoured.
Now, faced with the gut-churning anxiety of real adversity, he was perilously close to breaking. Everything depressed him. The apartment was dank and lonely. He had filled it with the accumulated junk from the Khan Rahman family storage unit, where old furniture went to die, stained and nicked by previous users, forgotten even by their own descendants. This detritus of past lives reminded him keenly of how small and pathetic his accomplishments were to date. He imagined himself joining the ranks of the many hundreds of anonymous Khan Rahmans, colorless people who lived and died without a trace.
As a would-be emissary, he had expected a life of intrigue and high glamour, of ancient djinn courts and magic. None of this had materialized yet. The only djinn he had managed to meet was Barabas, who seemed to prefer a low, dirty sort of existence among the dregs of society. Far from gaining anything, Rais had actually squandered the last of his savings trying to settle the djinn’s numerous bar tabs and prevent various strong men from beating them up. The sojourns into the seedy underbelly of illegal bars, brothels, and gambling dens had been entertaining in a ghastly way at first, but had eventually left him with a patina of psychic grime, a sense that he was becoming a part of this scene of desperate squalor, instead of a superior observer.
He missed his old Dhaka life, the constant stream of parties and dinners, the little excursions and entertainments. Everyone seemed to have forgotten him, even the family, once they realized that he had nothing to report and no djinn favors to offer. Pockets empty, he drew away from invitations where he might not be able to pay his share. Living abroad, nearly anonymous, he had been perfectly happy being skint. In his hometown, where everyone expected him to be rich, it was a different thing altogether. Maria’s loss was like a sore tooth. He was half convinced he loved her now, his days spent imagining her with the engineer, cuddling on her couch, drinking champagne and laughing at him.
As he sat in front of the TV flipping channels and drinking gin, his mind polished each of these little gems of misfortune, and he came to the bitter realization that by far the worst thing to happen to him was Matteras. At first he had taken Barabas’s statements with incredulity, but subsequent conversations had gradually convinced him that their doom, in fact, was inevitable. This abstract threat had become an awful black reality, choking all hope. Matteras was implacable, Matteras was all-powerful, Matteras hated humans for some reason. He wanted everyone to drown. The family would be wiped out, all of their wealth and culture and history buried under tons of silt and fish corpses. He was supposed to be the token resistance to all of this, the perfect fall guy, so unequal to the task that he might as well have gotten a head start and drowned himself in the tub. Which he would have done had his shitty bathroom been equipped with one.
He was all set to wait out the apocalypse in his shorts, but his mother came over eventually, and one look from her was enough to make him unburden all his woes.
“That girl is a bit of a gold digger,” she said, after hearing him out. “Everyone but you, dear son, has become certain of it during the past two years. If you could only see the way she smarmed around your father and Sikkim, you would be thankful she has revised her intention of marrying you.”
“Mother, you say that about every girl I’ve dated,” Rais said. He remembered bleakly the short list of his previous girlfriends, brief relationships that had amounted to nothing. “And she’s perfectly wealthy on her own.”
“In any case, I don’t blame her much for abandoning you, because even a gold digger has standards, and sad to say, you look as if you grew up in a bosti. Why on earth can’t you clean up around here? And why have you stopped shaving?” A bosti was a slum, of which there were many in Dhaka. In his youth, Rais had actually visited many of them in pursuit of drugs.
“I’m tired, Mama,” Rais said, slumping down farther on his broken couch.
“Tired of what, exactly?”
“This shitty apartment, having no money, no friends, no life,” Rais said. “They’re ashamed of me, you know.”
“Who?”
“All the old crew. Maria. Moffat. All our friends. They think I’ve been cut off. They won’t come to Mirpur, wouldn’t be caught dead out of the tristate. I’m just an afterthought now. It’s like I’ve stopped existing.”
“I see.”
“They all drive Beamers. I can barely afford the fuel for the ’81 Corolla you gave me. I never cared about the money thing before, you know? But—”
“All your life you’ve been given everything on a plate and you’ve swanned around with high principles. And now you’ve been shoved out into the real world and you don’t like it one bit. Is that what you’re saying, child?”
“Well…” This sounded a bit too much like the truth to be entirely palatable.
“Listen, you foolish boy!” Juny’s eyes pinned him down like a vulture contemplating a broken-winged pigeon. “You’ve been given a chance to enter a world of mystery and knowledge and incredible power, the true reality, and you’re whining about cars? You pathetic boy, if you want something, then damn well earn it.”
“That worked so well for Uncle Kaikobad, right?” Rais said. Kaikobad had seemingly lived in squalor for years until his coma. Rais’s secret dread was that he was facing down the same barrel.
“Your uncle married a djinn princess. Never forget that, when you’re pining after your gilded Maria.”
“She was a princess?”
“So I believe. It is a pity she didn’t survive childbirth.”
“Hmm, I wish uncle was awake now. We could use his help.”
“Why? What happened with Barabas? Did he rebuff you?”
“Barabas is the problem, but not how you think,” Rais said. He then recounted the entire threat. “It’s particularly galling that I’m probably going to meet the end in my boxers holding a dirty glass. I always pictured myself going out with a bit more style.”
“Are you serious?” Juny asked. “Even Matteras cannot be so cavalier, surely. He will have to go to court to do this. Or at the very least have an Assembly. There are always formalities with the djinn. Stop mewling like a little girl. And if you want to go out in style, then for god’s sake grow a pair of balls and put on a good suit.”
“Barabas seems to think this is more or less a foregone conclusion,” Rais said.
“Have you told your uncle?”
“No,” Rais said. “I actually haven’t left the house at all. Too busy mewling like a little girl.”
“All right, let’s keep it from him for now,” Juny said. “Did Barabas ask you to do anything specific?”
“No,” Rais said. “He said that as the next best thing to an active emissary, it was my job to sort this out. Oh, and he said that Kaikobad would have fixed this by now.”
“Okay, that’s good,” Juny said, “because he has just unwittingly given you official status.”
“What?”
“He has explicitly asked you to take an action befitting an emissary. Also he has implied you are Kaikobad’s replacement and therefore his legal equivalent. This is good.”
“How does this help us?”
“Did you study the patron-client relationship charts I made for you?”
“Er, a little bit. I’ve been busy—”
“Wallowing, yes,” Juny said. “Barabas was Kaikobad’s patron. In djinn practice, the patron-client relationship has a legal status with manifold rights and duties that go both ways. Now we can argue that by equivalating Kaikobad with you, he has implicitly granted you client status for this particular situation. As his client, you now have certain rights: one of which is the right to request an audience with his patron.”
“Bahamut.”
“Precisely,” Juny said. “He has just given us access to Bahamut.”
“Do you think Bahamut will agree to meet me?”
“Ordinarily, no,” Juny said. “However, this situation involves us somehow, specifically Kaikobad and his son. I have found that these djinn are not as stupid as they look. Don’t be surprised if Bahamut set this up as an unofficial channel for meeting you.”
“I don’t know about Bahamut, but Barabas is definitely as stupid as he looks,” Rais said.
Barabas, in fact, went into a towering rage when Rais approached him. He bellowed and blustered, he shook his fists and turned purple. Rais was well prepared for this, however, having spent three days boning up on the Lore. While information on this was scant, Juny had compiled a formidable collection of all things djinn and had access to certain correspondents that baffled even Rais.
“Where on earth did you learn all this from?” Barabas said, finally defeated.
“My mother,” Rais said.
“That—that horrible woman!” Barabas said bitterly. “She has been plaguing us ever since poor Kaikobad went to sleep.”
“Are we going to go, then?”
“Not right now,” Barabas snapped. “Do you think we can just drop in on Bahamut? He lives in the bottom of the ocean, for god’s sake!”
“Can’t you just… ?” Rais waved his hand in a vaguely magical gesture, which further enraged the djinn.
“No, I most certainly cannot. Do you have a submarine, hmm? Do you have a pressure suit? Do you know how to avoid the ninety-nine wards that protect Bahamut from intrusion? Hmm? I didn’t think so.”
“Do djinns use submarines?” Rais asked, curious.
“We invented submarines, ha!” Barabas said. “Come to think of it, you actually might have a submarine.”
“I’m quite sure I don’t.”
“Your uncle did.”
“He had a submarine?”
Barabas gave him a knowing glance. “I helped him build it myself. He was smarter than you Khan Rahmans gave him credit for. Plenty of djinns owed him favors too.”
“Where is it?”
“It was moored in Kanchpur, along the Shitalakya River. Probably still is,” Barabas said. “He had an understanding with one of the factory owners there. I’ll see you on Friday. I have to explain to Bahamut why exactly I’m forced to bring a random Hume to visit him.”
Barabas’s capitulation quickly dispelled Rais’s ennui. Here, at last, was the magical kingdom he had glimpsed the edges of. Once again the old excitement gripped him, and he spent a day riffling through the Wari house, looking for Kaikobad’s secrets. He questioned Butloo minutely, but that worthy was not extremely helpful, either from a lifetime of paranoid secrecy or genuine ignorance. In the end, he found a collection of biblical texts: a translated copy of the ancient Masoretic Old Testament, another copy of the translated Greek Hebrew Bible, and a moth-eaten King James New Testament—some of the few books left in the house, the rest having long ago been ransacked by his mother. There were notes scribbled along the margins and empty spaces, but these were incomprehensible and faded.
Still, his spirits were much improved, and he entered the Two Brothers Jute Mill on Friday ready for anything. Juny had called ahead and spoken to the owner of the factory, who turned out to be a mutual acquaintance and pleased enough to entertain a scion of the Khan Rahman family. The manager met him at the gate and escorted him to a lavish lunch, where he found Barabas already availing himself.
They ate for a long time, Barabas apprising him of the fact that further food might be in short supply for an indefinite amount of time, Bahamut not being particularly known for hospitality. In fact, the djinn appeared to feel that there was a strong possibility that Rais would not return at all, depending on that great creature’s displeasure, and was treating this in part as a farewell feast. This was not enough to dampen Rais’s mood and he made an excellent lunch. Any action was better than just sitting and waiting for the end.
After dessert, they retired to the short concrete jetty for some tea, at which point the manager raised the slight issue of outstanding payments and moorage fees.
“Did Uncle Kaikobad actually ever pay you?” Rais asked with some skepticism.
“Not as such,” the manager said. “As per our agreements, he actually owes us seventeen years of dues. He always signed for everything, though. Am I correct in assuming that you wish to take over this vehicle?”
“Er, yes,” Rais said.
“And you’ll sign for the entire liability?”
“Certainly,” Rais said with great haughtiness, appreciating for the first time the way Kaikobad conducted business.
“Enough of this accountancy!” Barabas belched loudly. “We must be off. Be sure to take the packed leftovers, human.”
The manager ushered them down some steps to a boat that was rocking gently. Laborers began hauling on thick, tar-blackened rope, which eventually went taut. As their muscles strained and beaded with sweat, a slight bulge appeared in the water, and then a smooth brass sphere broke the surface. The laborers started tying off the rope against the jetty.
“Quick, quick,” the manager said, literally pushing them off. “Someone will see!”
“Thank you for lunch and everything,” Rais said in parting. “And of course, give my best to Uncle Iqbal, in case I don’t return…”
“Sir, you know that man is a djinn, right?” the manager asked, clutching his shirtsleeve convulsively.
“Yes, I am aware.”
“Just checking,” the manager said. He motioned to the ferryman to start rowing. “Good luck.”
They rowed out to the brass bubble. Barabas spent a moment fiddling with it before he managed to release the catch, and the sphere slid open to reveal a thick glass top, which also had to be levered up. The aperture was barely wide enough for a medium-size man, and the djinn lost some skin as he slithered in feetfirst. Rais followed him into a cramped interior lit by a greenish glow, which revealed a mess of instrumentation surrounding two semi-reclining car seats of aged leather. This was the bulbous front of the machine. There was, additionally, large glass portholes directly in front, below their feet, and above their heads, giving them a roughly 180-degree view of the scummy river water. These were covered with a grille of brass rods and hinged from the inside.
