Djinn City, page 18
“Humph. Of course it does.” He did appear mollified, however.
“We need a ride up. Orders from Himself,” Barabas said.
“That oceanic bastard can go stuff himself,” Golgoras said. “I ain’t one of his damn clients, to be ordered about—”
“Remember ’59?” Barabas said.
“Humph, fine. You using Bahamut’s auctoritas?”
“My own is sufficient, I believe!” Barabas said.
Golgoras gave him a look intimating that no such thing was the case. “Where do you want to go? The Hub?”
“No. We need to find Risal. She lives in a sky house up in the remote quadrant. I have some last known coordinates.”
“These are twenty years old, you fool!”
“She can’t have gone far. It’s a floater, not a damn rocket ship.”
“All right, come then. Going to the Hub anyways. If this takes more than three days, it’s on the big man’s account.”
The Sephiroth, actually, was quite enormous and sitting in perfectly plain view. The upper envelope was a torpedo-shaped blimp, rather predatory in a rakish sort of way, shark teeth designs running up the sides, the fabric something shimmery, lovingly etched with djinn-powered runes invisible to the naked eye. The ship part was a low-slung aluminum canister with complex wooden spars and rigging, complete with steering fins on either side, a couple of ship rotors at the end, and exhaust flues angling up from some kind of steam or combustion engine. The thing had an actual battering ram attached to the front in the shape of a gargoyle’s fist. Moreover, there seemed to be cannons mounted on swivels at strategic intervals. Rais’s estimation of the captain went up considerably; he really was a pirate.
“We have stealth tech, for when we’re up there,” Golgoras said as they boarded. “The Humes think we’re a weather balloon.”
“So, done any piracy lately?” Rais asked casually.
Golgoras glared at him. “No such thing as piracy up here.”
“Awful lot of guns then.”
Golgoras telescoped his eye threateningly, and Rais shut up.
The central control cabin was indeed crammed with peculiar-looking weapons, crates of contraband items, and nothing much in the way of furniture. The instrumentation was lovingly done in brass, in much the same fashion as the submarine, in what was possibly a signature style for djinn.
“Passenger cabins that way.” Golgoras pointed to a narrow passage behind a reinforced wooden door. “Stay off the gun decks, stay out of the engine room. I have three crew members, they’re my vassals, and they are under pain of death not to speak, so do not bother talking to them. Meals will be served in your rooms.”
“Easy now,” Barabas said. “You’ve become antisocial, wandering around all alone.”
“In case of emergency, I’m throwing both of you overboard,” Golgoras said. “Now clear off, I’m going to get airborne.”
“Oh, we’d like to watch,” Barabas said hopefully.
“The cockpit is off-limits to civilians,” Golgoras said rudely. “At all times. Now move it.”
They repaired to the cabins, which were little more than cramped alcoves with hammocks tied at intervals, creating a bunk bed effect. There were portholes at eye level, however, and once they were settled in things did not seem so bad.
“Bit tight,” Rais said. “Beautiful ship, though. Your captain friend is a bit grumpy.”
“The Sephiroth is famous,” Barabas said, scowling. “Golgoras has gotten very high and mighty ever since he got it. How did he get it, you ask? Very dark deeds, I wouldn’t be surprised. He says he won it in a race, but I don’t know. He’s become paranoid too. Doesn’t want us around the cockpit snooping on his air charts and instrumentation. All these captains are so uppity. You’d think he’d let us watch from the wheelhouse.”
“I’m happy hanging over here. You want a drink?”
“He’s pretty low on crew. Just those three half-wit Ghuls.”
“Ghuls?”
“Djinn, but an inferior race,” Barabas said. “Poor fellows can hardly control their distortion fields. Not very smart either. Strong, though, and good workers—don’t mind the nasty, dangerous stuff. Golgoras must be doing quite well if he can afford to hire three of them. Still, it’s a big ship for just the four of them to manage.”
“I’m amazed no one’s noticed all these djinn flying around.”
“Why should they? Sky’s a big place, plenty of room for everyone,” Barabas said. “Plus we’ve got fantastic stealth tech. Your radars probably think we’re birds or something. Anyway, back to the point, this ship is seriously undermanned.”
“What?”
“Theoretically speaking, I bet we could overpower Golgoras and take the Sephiroth. Imagine the dignatas!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Just a hypothetical plan. Not being serious, of course,” Barabas said with relish. “We’d have to take down Golgoras by ambush and capture the cockpit. The Ghuls will be too stupid to realize what’s happening, if we get him down fast enough.”
“Yeah, sure,” Rais said.
“Good, good,” Barabas said. “First you take the Saber of Easy Cutting and strike through his distortion field. He’ll be so surprised that—”
“Um, is that my uncle’s sword?”
“Yes, of course, you did bring it, didn’t you?”
“Er, no.”
“What? Why? Why would you leave behind a one-of-a-kind magic sword particularly efficacious in fighting djinn? Why?”
“Well, it’s really heavy and sharp—”
“It’s a sword! It’s a sword! It’s supposed to be sharp!”
“Also”—Rais held up his hand—“the wires wrapping the hilt are kind of frayed and they cut my hand. See?”
“Well, at least tell me that you’ve brought the Invisible Dagger of Five Strikes.”
“Ahem. We might have misplaced that.”
“What?!”
“Well, it is invisible, and I distinctly remember putting it in my duffel bag, but…”
“So what the devil did you bring?” Barabas looked ready to cry.
“Cheer up, I’ve still got the pipe. Plus my glasses, of course. And also this bottle of whiskey from Uncle’s secret stash.”
“Is it a never-ending bottle?”
“No.” Rais took a sniff. “Not a particularly good blend either.”
“Oh, all right.” Barabas shifted in his hammock glumly. “Pass it here. It’s almost like you don’t even want to fight…”
“Well, to be honest, hand-to-hand combat isn’t really my thing.”
“Kaikobad would have waded in with that thing—”
“Yeah, yeah, Kaikobad would have stuffed Golgoras into a lamp and conquered the skies with an army of Ghuls,” Rais said. “You and me, though, we’d be Golgoras’s bitch in two minutes max.”
“Humph, if we had the sword we could have made short work of him.”
“Cheer up, let’s just enjoy the ride.”
CHAPTER 22
Head in the Clouds
Two days into the journey, spent floating serenely from cloud to cloud, flying at deceptively fast paces, they were thoroughly lost with very little idea of up or down, or whether they had covered any distance at all. The portholes showed white, blue, and sometimes the gray of a thunderhead, the gentle curve of the rigid air envelope sloping up above like an avuncular sky god, dominating everything over the horizon. There were no reference points, no sightings of land, not even birds to keep them company, and they lounged in a trancelike state of timelessness, careless of measure or distance.
Golgoras too seemed infected by this languor; apparently satisfied with their harmlessness, he allowed them out of their hammocks and gave them a limited run of the ship, even tolerating their company for some hours in the cockpit, which was fascinating in all its steamer brass glory.
If Rais had found the submarine bizarre, at least that craft had had a modicum of human influence. The airship was fully djinn, with bizarre instrumentation and a subtle, needling sensation that everything was a little bit off. Rais’s obvious admiration of the vehicle, coupled with his stoned, drunken harmlessness, appeased Golgoras to such a level that he was even willing, in short bursts, to expound on the many modifications and innovations found in the Sephiroth, which were completely unavailable to other, inferior ships.
Rais realized that even the most taciturn of djinns were, given the opportunity, prone to bombastic boasting.
“We could land anywhere. Anywhere. I’ve taken her down in the Russian tundra. On an Arctic glacier. In the Sahara. Tell me a fixed-wing monstrosity that can do that, eh?”
“Don’t you ever see planes up here? How can they not know such an enormous—and beautiful!—airship is wandering around at will?”
“We stay above their cruising altitude,” Golgoras said. “They all fly on autopilot anyway. At those speeds they can’t see shit. They’re so busy zipping around that they don’t even know there is an entire world up here. And we have radar disrupters.”
“Are we going to meet up with other airships?”
“Unlikely. This is a pretty remote area. We’re now close to Risal’s last known location,” Golgoras said. “If we can’t find her soon, we’ll go to the Hub and ask around. You’ll have run out of auctoritas by then, and I’ll probably just maroon you.” He winked to signal it was a joke, but as his remaining eye was a monstrous red thing that seemed capable of swallowing and ingesting small life-forms whole, it was hardly reassuring.
“Is the Hub like a floating city?” Here was the stuff of legends Rais had been expecting to find.
“Nothing so grand. It’s more like a docking station and clubhouse for the Royal Aeronautics Society. No entry without membership. I’ll have to pay a fee to sign you guys in.” He seemed fairly disgruntled at this prospect.
“Yes, yes, it’s a real secret hideout,” Barabas sneered. “Let me say that of all the clubs, the RAS is filled with the most ridiculous, childish, purposeless members with hardly any use to regular society—”
“I seem to remember you applied once or twice,” Golgoras said with a nasty grin.
“Yes, well, that was before I got to know you lot—”
“Got rejected too, didn’t you?” Golgoras continued. “Not Aeronautics material, they said, if I recall. Memmion had a good laugh about that one.”
“Memmion can go stuff himself!” Barabas said. “He’s a fat bastard!”
“Memmion is a much greater djinn than that stupid fish you follow around!”
“You lot are nothing but a bunch of pirates!” Barabas said, thrusting his chin out.
“You’re just a landlubber!” Golgoras said, leaning down toward the shorter djinn.
“Guys, guys, look!” Rais, who had now spotted the first thing for several days that was not a cloud, had to rapidly blink to clear the cigar haze from his eyes.
Spinning lazily in the middle of a giant cirrus was a pearly, opaque tube, several meters in diameter and over a dozen in length.
“It’s actually a tube,” Rais said. “How does it stay up?”
“Distortion field tech,” Barabas said. “Risal was an important Marid. Quite a lot of auctoritas. Such a waste.”
“It shouldn’t be here,” Golgoras said. “It’s way off course. Where are its proximity markers? Or her little airship?”
“Look at that!” Barabas was, in fact, using the captain’s telescope, so the others had to crowd around and jostle him to get a view.
“What is it?” Rais asked, after Golgoras had wrenched the instrument away.
“The hatch on the end is open,” Golgoras said. “It looks like the pressure seal is broken. Something has happened.”
“What now?” Barabas asked.
“I will hail her on the loudspeaker. Then we will try to dock.”
Predictably, Golgoras’s hail went unanswered. The tube seemed fully deserted. Docking was a problem. Closer examination showed that the docking mechanism of the tube had broken away, presumably along with whatever craft Risal normally kept in it. Golgoras maneuvered the airship over the spinning tube and then sent the Ghuls over the side with ropes.
It quickly became apparent that air-to-air docking was fraught at the best of times, a dangerous exercise in trial and error. After several attempts the Ghuls managed to hook the open hatch of the tube, gently slowing it down. Fixing a guide ladder to the hatch took another hour of tinkering. Finally, Golgoras made them sign waivers, and then equipped them with warm clothes, mountain-climbing harnesses, and an oxygen tank for Rais. The djinn, apparently, were not susceptible to altitude sickness, yet another sign of their superiority, as astutely observed by Barabas. The Ghuls gathered around to lower them into the hatch via a heavy iron pulley, their brutish faces lighting up with the simple joy of playing with a human yo-yo.
The air was austere at this height, disdaining the clutter of oxygen, and the cold was a gripping, numbing monster, instantly reducing Rais to a quivering wreck. He dropped like an inert package, bouncing around against Barabas and the guide ladder, unable to grab it or control his descent in any way. Luckily, the Ghuls, lacking in intelligence, were gifted with hyperspecialist physical attributes, which included, among other things, the apparent ability to thread a spinning needle in one go.
It was only a few seconds before they popped into the hatch, and the instant gratifying change in barometric pressure and heat told Rais that some remnant of Risal’s magic remained. He steadied himself and saw that glowing runes still functioned all along the tube, holding in air and pressure despite the slow leak of the open hatch. Everything else was in disarray.
The tube was a simple white corridor, with living quarters in one end and a large open work area in the other, dominated by circular bookshelves spiraling the entire length of the structure, all the contents spilled haphazardly, torn and trampled, carelessly rifled. The bed was upturned, a simple table splintered, chairs askew, and everywhere the sign of long abandonment, a dusty coating of neglect and disuse.
“Not here then,” Barabas said, poking around, obviously disappointed at the lack of spoils. “This place looks like it’s been pirated several times. Funny, Golgoras found it pretty quick. I wouldn’t be surprised if he looted it himself, before.”
“She had a lot of books.”
“Scholar, wasn’t she?” Barabas said. He kicked an ancient almanac with disgust. “What a big waste of time. All that auctoritas, and she collects a bunch of useless books.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
“Either she left, or there was an accident,” Barabas said, bored.
“Or someone killed her.”
“Djinn don’t murder each other. Against the Lore,” Barabas said. “It’s what makes us superior to you violent fools.”
“Okay, this is an expensive tube, right?”
“Ridiculously,” Barabas said. He touched the walls appreciatively. “Humes couldn’t make this. Not in a million years.”
“It say’s Hyundai on this plaque,” Rais said. “This was made in Korea!”
“Well, that is, Humes might have made the components, but no way they could put it up in the sky,” Barabas said. “Mind you, with prices these days, it must have cost Risal an arm and a leg.”
“So it doesn’t make sense that she’d just leave it abandoned. Plus she left all her books lying around. They were clearly her prized possessions. I doubt she’d just ruin everything like this,” Rais said. “If we rule out that she just wandered away, that leaves accident. Maybe a storm or something hit her while she was outside.”
“Had to be a pretty heavy accident,” Barabas said grudgingly.
“Why?”
“Risal was powerful,” Barabas said. “I mean like solid distortion field. She should have survived any kind of natural disaster.”
“We might as well look through her stuff,” Rais said.
“This is a hell of a wasted trip,” Barabas grumbled.
Things continued in this vein for some time, with Barabas hogging the pipe and complaining, while Rais made a desultory search of the area. The documents and books were in many languages, some human, some djinn, and spoke compellingly of Risal’s erudition. Then Rais found a calendar under the bed, and they spent some time giggling over Risal’s faithful recording of daily caloric intake and bowel movements.
“This is over twenty years ago,” Barabas said finally, finding the last entry.
“Nothing here is more recent,” Rais said. “This soup can expired twenty-five years ago. There’s some soda here that is over twenty years old.”
“So she disappeared twenty years ago,” Barabas said.
“Check her last few entries.”
“She had a good breakfast, and her poop was regular,” Barabas said.
“Is there nothing else in the damn schedule?”
“Oh, wait, I missed some bits.”
“It would be a lot faster if I could read djinn.”
“Kaiko could read djinn,” Barabas said.
“Yeah, yeah, he was a real genius. He also farted lightning and slept on nails.”
“Not really. He used the glasses.”
“Oh.” Rais had a go. “It works,” he said stupidly.
“Of course.”
“You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”
Barabas shrugged. “I told you it was good loot.”
Rais hit the books with renewed energy, dazzled by the sudden wealth of information. Something like the old curiosity and wonder fired through him, and he began reading feverishly. His brain started to operate once again at peak capacity after years of atrophy. It was not to last, alas. All too soon he realized that djinn writing, regardless of topic or author, typically exuded a bombastic, prevaricating, self-glorifying quality. Even the most trivial observations were presented as ground-shaking theories. Ludicrous assertions were made with casual disregard for logic. Evidence was that rare beautiful virgin—frequently alluded to yet hardly ever produced.
He found entire volumes of Risal’s own work, ranging from djinn and human history to treatises on rare Amazon earthworms. She had a particularly pompous way about her, treating any foolhardy reader with punishing contempt, speaking in some passages as if to a child, and in others deliberately obfuscating the content until it was more or less gibberish. All her work was over a hundred years old, however. There was no sign of her recent studies.
