Djinn City, page 15
This central cabin was roughly 130 square feet and so crowded with gear that they had to literally climb over each other to reach their seats. The cabin, and presumably the submarine itself, was shaped like a comma. The rear tapered off to a narrow oval door, beyond which lay the engine chamber. This housed a marine engine, very old but beautifully maintained.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Rais realized that the entire machine had been lovingly built with extraordinary attention to detail. Each meter was mounted in a heavy brass case buffed to a gleam. The cables were aligned perfectly in their grooves, sheathed with a crosshatch of thin copper wire. Toggle switches were heavy and moved with audible clicks. Even the seats were trimmed in soft leather, the safety belts forming a cross harness across the chest.
“This is beautiful,” Rais said, sitting down. “I can’t believe Uncle Kaikobad built this. We always thought he was a drunk.”
“He was,” Barabas said. “But he was brilliant too. I helped him with some of it. You see how everything is polished and tip-top? That’s me. Anti-rust spell. Slows down entropy in the cabin.”
“What? Like you don’t age if you stay in here?”
“Probably. Kaikobad always looked pretty young considering all the things he drank…”
“He was so poor,” Rais said. “We always pitied him…”
“Yes, in your world he was poor,” Barabas said. “But in ours he was wealthy. Don’t you know that it is his dignatas you are using to see Bahamut? Now strap up, we have a long way to go.”
The engine caught on the first try, and the rotors started spinning smoothly. The displacement chambers took in water, and the submarine slid deeper into the river like a predatory eel, until they were grazing the bottom. The water was murky, and very soon Rais was too disoriented to see how fast they were going or even in which direction. Soon they were entirely reliant on the gyroscopes for navigation. There was also a SONAR, which was mainly tracking the seafloor to avoid any collisions.
The ship continued to accelerate until Rais was pushed back into his seat and the brass fittings began to rattle. Still Barabas pushed the throttle. Rais’s fillings began to hurt, and his eyeballs sank back into his skull in a funny way that presaged some kind of medical catastrophe.
“How fast are we going?!” he screamed. His lips started to peel back.
Barabas turned to him with a fierce grin. “We augmented the engine with some djinn-tech! This is the fastest submarine vehicle in the Bay of Bengal!”
“Slow down! Slow down!”
The djinn eased the throttle somewhat and the red glow tingeing Rais’s vision began to fade.
“You humans are so fragile,” Barabas complained.
They continued at a more modest pace. It had never occurred to Rais that he might become bored cruising the bay in a djinn submarine, but the view was an unchanging murky black, and after closely examining all the varied dials and levers, he really had nothing to do. Eventually, the drone of the machines and Barabas’s arcane muttering over charts was enough to lull him into a nap.
He was woken several hours later by a violent commotion. Barabas was swearing fluently in two languages. The submarine was creaking in distress and various alarms were ringing. Gigantic tentacles armed with suckers slapped against the multiple portholes, scrabbling fiendishly, the vacuum cups trying to find purchase against the smooth outer finish. The front view was most alarming: a large beak-like mouth was trying its best to swallow the submarine whole!
“Bahamut!” Rais screamed incoherently. In his mind he had pictured the djinn as this very kind of Cthulhuian nightmare.
“It’s not Bahamut, idiot,” Barabas said. “It’s his damn colossal squid!”
“What? Like a pet?”
A gigantic eye, as large as the entire frontal porthole, was now peering at them curiously.
“Sort of…” Barabas was wrestling with the controls. The submarine was now shaking with the whine of stressed metal and overheating engines. “Remember I told you Bahamut had wards? She’s one of them.”
“Why is she attacking us? Aren’t you Bahamut’s client?”
“Yes, well, Bahamut doesn’t like visitors,” Barabas said. “And if I recall it was your great idea to come here.”
“We’re going to be flattened in a minute,” Rais said, looking around in a futile search for weapons. “Don’t you have torpedoes or anything?”
“This isn’t a war craft,” Barabas said, scrambling out of his seat. “I’m shutting down the engines before the propellers get wrecked!”
“Wait!” Rais had found the switch for what appeared to be two powerful front-mounted headlights. He flicked the knob and prayed.
The lamps switched on, and djinn-powered light speared directly into the giant eye. With an eldritch shriek the squid threw the submarine aside, blinking rapidly and generally agitating her tentacles in pain. Rais jammed the throttle to maximum. With a great metallic rattle the engines kicked into an ultrasonic whine; water surged across the portholes in a dark curtain as they shot down toward the ocean floor, below the squid’s grasping arms, the sudden kick throwing both of them violently forward.
“Keep us going down!” Barabas said, crawling toward the engine door. “Try to lose her!”
“She’s chasing us! Oh god, she’s fast…”
“The engines are smoking,” Barabas called out. “I must say, I did an excellent job with them . . .”
“She’s catching us, for god’s sake—we’re too slow!”
“Just keep the propeller between her mouth and us,” Barabas said. “Zigzag a little bit. That’s it.”
“You’re enjoying this,” Rais said with some disbelief.
“Well, it’s rare sport,” Barabas said. “Not too many kraken to be found these days.”
“Er, Barabas,” Rais said. “There are two red glowing things up ahead moving around. What are they?”
“Sentient sea mines,” Barabas said. “It’s a Bahamut specialty. Try to avoid them.”
“What do you mean ‘avoid them’?!” Rais said, aggrieved. “They’re moving right at us. And you’re in the same boat.”
“Well, I’d probably survive the explosion.”
The glowing red spheres were now approaching them with menace. All of a sudden they swerved to the side. Something heavy hit the back of the vehicle. Rais could feel the propellers getting fouled. A suckered tentacle slapped across the top porthole and slowly slid off, leaving some kind of foul lubricating sucker gunk. The squid had caught up.
“Awesome!” Barabas shouted with idiotic excitement. “It’s trying to eat us now! Turn on auxiliary power! The kraken has stuck her beak into the main propeller!”
“What the fuck is auxiliary power?” Rais screamed. “Barabas, for god’s sake help me instead of being retarded!”
Barabas flipped a lever, and two auxiliary steering motors started spinning below the main rotor. The submarine, still attached to the kraken, started to limp forward. The mines, meanwhile, were quivering in distress.
“Look, they’re confused,” Barabas said. “I don’t think they’re allowed to blow up the kraken!”
“Well, that’s great, because we’re halfway down her gullet,” Rais said.
“Just keep moving forward,” Barabas said. “We’re nearly there. Steer for that pillar.”
“Pillar? We’re in the bottom of the damned ocean.”
There was, however, a pillar of sorts, a great crud-encrusted monolith that looked like a vaguely man-made finger. The kraken by now was apparently reconsidering her decision to swallow them, except the main propeller was stuck inside her beak, and thus they were truly melded together into a semi-organic floating device with retarded mobility, a peculiar machine-squid hybrid monster leering this way and that, escorted in agitated fashion by the glowing red mines.
“Ramming speed!” Barabas yelled, seizing the auxiliary throttle from Rais and jamming it forward.
The squid-submarine lurched up, threatening to approach a pace that would actually lend a modicum of weight to the concept of ramming.
“Stop! Stop at once!” A colossal shadow came over them, swallowing all sense of perspective. The voice was deep and heavy, a rolling timbre that rattled the teeth in Rais’s mouth and slammed the instrumentation into a dizzying spin. The mines stood down, red dots dimming in contrition and general bashfulness; the squid was even worse, turning from ferocious beast to spineless, near-somnolent pet radiating a palpable air of injured innocence. The submarine too went slack, as if apologizing for even threatening to approach ramming speed. It rolled to a gentle stop, its snub nose just bumping the monolith. Rais wanted to flash the headlights at the gigantic shape above, but he didn’t dare.
“You have hurt my Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni,” the voice said quietly.
“Meso what? Is he talking about the squid?” Barabas muttered.
“Hurt the squid? The thing damn near ate us,” Rais said.
“Shh, he can hear you…” Barabas hissed.
“I CAN HEAR YOU! ARE YOU INSULTING THE MESONYCHOTEUTHIS HAMILTONI?!”
“Er, sorry, Bahamut,” Rais said, and then for good measure, “Sorry, squid.”
“That’s better,” Bahamut said. “Barabas, I see you loitering there. I heard you trying to ram the pillar of Gangaridai.”
“Sorry, Bahamut,” Barabas said.
“You know that is my favorite pillar,” Bahamut continued.
“Won’t do it again, Bahamut.”
“I think I see a crack.” Rais was studying a part of the pillar scraped clean by their ramming and further illuminated by the great headlights. It was indeed man-made, for the newly revealed surface was covered with Sanskrit-looking writing and diagrams, etched deep into the stone and seemingly plated with gold. At the top was a great seal, a crudely drawn elliptical serpent eating its own tail.
“Will you shut up… ?” Barabas pinched his arm painfully.
“What? The pillar is cracked?! Impossible! The pillar of Gangaridai is indestructible!”
“Now look what you’ve done,” Barabas hissed angrily.
“What did I do?” Rais asked. “It’s a great big crack. Anyone can see it. The damned thing can fall on us any minute. I’m backing up.”
“Will you SHUT UP?” Barabas said. “Stop agitating him, okay? I told you he’s a bit sensitive about this Gangaridai stuff.”
“What the hell is Gangaridai?” Rais lowered his voice into a barely audible murmur. “And what the hell is wrong with him? Is he brain damaged?”
“He’s just old,” Barabas said. “We have this thing. In djinndom, some individuals grow really old, well beyond the regular life span. They become a bit strange.”
“We have that thing too, it’s called senility…”
The shape of the great Marid above, which had been a huge indiscriminate shadow, was now coalescing into a form flecked with silver, an undulating dervish of scales catching the light, something bizarre and beautiful, a thousand eyes glinting out from the depths, focused all of a sudden with unnatural intelligence at Rais. Bahamut was not, in fact, a whale, as Rais had been imagining. He was a massive school of alien fish.
“Tell that human, Mr. Barabas, that I am not senile…”
“Er, yes, Bahamut,” Barabas said. “Might I present to you this newest scion of the ancient emissary family, the eminent clan of the Khan Rahmans, the—”
“The nephew of Kaikobad, hmm?”
“Yeah.”
“Sit up straight, Hume. Let me get a look at you.”
Rais straightened up in his chair as best he could.
“Most unimpressive. Singularly unhandsome. I cannot believe the inconvenience Kaikobad is putting us through. So what is it you want?”
Rais was quickly discovering that senile or not, Bahamut’s full regard carried with it a physical weight. The thousands of eyes were literally pinning him down with the force of magnified gravity, and he was beginning to feel nauseated. All the protocols drilled into him by his mother left his mind, and he found himself blurting out the truth.
“Barabas says that the djinn Matteras is going to blow up the Bay of Bengal with an earthquake, and it’s my job to fix it.”
“Hmm, is he now? I should not like that.”
“So I was hoping you would stop him?”
“Do not worry, young Hume. I have been saving something for this very day.”
“Oh, perfect,” Rais said. “Like some kind of secret weapon?”
“Yes, I have a device of ancient and venerable lineage, old even to the ancient masters of Gangaridai, before the ending of the Ice Age.”
“Right. Sounds fantastic. I can’t believe I was so worried. Of course you’ve got it covered.”
“It will disrupt the flow of time and remove us permanently from this linear progression.”
“Er, what?”
“The ancients created many devices trying to penetrate the secrets of time.”
“Ahem,” said Barabas.
“I have just been dying to use it.”
Barabas raised his hand to signal his desire to speak. “Bahamut, was this the fabled device that started off the last ice age and almost destroyed all of us?”
“Hmm, yes, well, fracturing time like that will have certain effects.”
“But you’ve fixed it, right?” Rais was getting an all-too-familiar sick feeling in his gut, a churning dismay that seemed to go hand in hand with all djinn conversations.
“Not as such, young Hume,” Bahamut said. “Not as such.”
“Lord Bahamut, sir, er, could I confer with my, um, patron Barabas here for a second?”
“Certainly. I shall withdraw to tend to the M. hamiltoni.”
“Barabas! He’s a damned lunatic!”
“I told you…”
“Does he really have this fractal time bomb thing?”
“Who knows?” Barabas shrugged. “He’s eccentric. He might have built it for the first Gangaridai for all I know.”
“Don’t you guys keep track of this kind of thing?”
“Us djinn are more free-spirited, antiestablishment types,” Barabas said. “We don’t go in for big government.”
“His solution is worse than the problem!”
“That’s Bahamut for you,” Barabas said. “Got to admire his style. His dignatas is going to jump through the roof if he detonates that bomb.”
“It’s like the cure is worse than the disease.”
“It always is, my young friend.”
“I might as well start building an ark.”
“Noah tried that once.”
“I think that’s just a myth.”
“No, no, some of the old djinns have records apparently. He was a boating enthusiast. Antediluvian times. The good old days, for us…”
“Barabas, what the hell are we supposed to do?”
“You could always ask for a bit of time.”
“Yeah, like seventy years or so. Let me die an old man before you destroy everything.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Barabas and Hume!” Bahamut returned, his myriad eyes shining accusingly at their brass vessel. “The M. hamiltoni has been telling me of your reckless and fickle harassment of it.”
“Our sincere apologies, Bahamut,” Rais said. “We mistakenly thought that the hamiltoni was trying to eat us.”
“That is a ridiculous accusation. He is a dedicated vegetarian.”
“Yes, I realize that now—he’s obviously a very peaceful creature. We in fact mistook his affection for ravenous hunger.”
“Quite so,” Bahamut said coldly.
“Bahamut, as the acting trainee emissary substitute, could I ask that you hold off on your, ah, fractal time device until we have had a chance to try more conventional means?”
“Certainly, if you and Barabas wish to have some sport against Matteras, who am I to deny you your fun?”
“Then could you offer any insight into another method of stopping Matteras?”
“Well, he’s stronger than you, cleverer than you, much more dignified, and blessed with a large following of djinn supporters, apparently, according to Twitter.”
“You follow Twitter?”
“Follow? We’re the ones who invented it! Djinns love brevity. It’s a racial trait, I’m sure you’ve discerned.”
“Not really, no.”
“In any case, I should think that any frontal assault on Matteras would be completely useless.”
“Well, can we negotiate with him?”
“Ah, yes, we djinn love negotiations! But do you have anything he wants?”
“I don’t know.”
“That, in a nutshell, is your problem I’d say.” Bahamut seemed amused now. “Matteras, after ages of disdaining humanity, has once again delved his nose into the affairs of mortals. What exactly does he want? Is he an Iso-Creationist buffoon? Does he truly believe their crackpot theories? Or is there something else? Discover that, and you might well have something to negotiate with.”
“I see. Is there any chance of you being more specific?”
“No. I am not up to date with current affairs.”
“Well, Master, can I say something?” Barabas said. “Should this human filth, a lowly client of a client, somehow forestall Matteras, or even put up the shadow of a good fight, would that not result in a massive gain of dignatas for us, mostly you? Could you not, in fact, prance around saying that even your lowliest Hume servant is a match for Matteras?”
“Hmm, yes, the dignatas accrued would be astonishing. Although I’m quite sure that I never prance. That sounds vaguely insulting, Barabas. Let me offer further advice then, Hume. Look specifically into the history of Matteras’s own bloodline, which is bound intricately with Gangaridai. The progeny of human and djinn are very rare. There was a time, however, when it was not so.”
“Before the Great War,” Barabas said.
“Yes, I would look into ancient history, things forgotten by modern djinn,” Bahamut said. “There is a certain historian djinn who might have access to this and other curious information. A very erudite lady, although not known, perhaps, for clarity. Seek her out discreetly. She is the Marid Risal, who lives in the sky. I believe she has a reputation for collecting frivolous and obscure facts—a collection of seemingly useless knowledge that might in this very particular time cause embarrassment to the power of Matteras.”
