Djinn City, page 20
“Matteras is an archconservative,” Golgoras said. “Djinn life is sacred. Murder is out. They take the Lore literally.”
“Well, murder—aha!” Barabas said. “I’ve got it! I’m a genius! They’re all in Matteras’s murder pit!”
“That’s kind of what I was leading up to…” Rais said.
“I’ve solved it!” Barabas was unstoppable. “We find the murder pit, we find all of them.”
“They’re all dead,” Golgoras said. “That’s the point of a murder pit. It’s been years.”
“Ha! It’s Givaras. Wanna bet he’s still alive?” Barabas said.
“So if this guy’s alive, then my cousin’s been stuck in a pit with this psycho djinn for the past ten years?”
“Yup,” Barabas said. “Really bad luck, that. He’s fucked.”
CHAPTER 24
Kaikobad
Kaikobad stood on the seawall, staring out into the ocean. There were many others with him, watching. The city behind him was broken. The walls still held, her defenders still defended, but something vital had gone out: the sense of invincibility, perhaps; the insouciance that had characterized her lowliest denizen.
Six times, Kuriken had driven off the invading armies, scattering them, destroying their princes, taking the war across the world, to Kemet and Babylon, to high Lhasa and the plains of Harappa, everywhere djinn revolted, poisoned by Horus, who never fought, but whispered and cajoled, bringing madness in his wake. Kuriken had scorched the earth with his power, had extinguished tribes and ground to dirt nascent cities, yet nothing changed.
Six times, Memmion had returned, raising armies from god knows where, lately even raising the dead, animating them with power and hurling them like offal at the walls. Gangaridai had lost. The city might hold, might rule this land forever, but her dominion over the world was finished. The City of Peace was lost, the innocence and promise of the First Empire was gone, and with it came a peculiar sadness, as if a path had been shown and rejected: the djinn had chosen discord instead, had opted for violence, chaos, and random chance. For a brief period something wondrous had existed, but it was not the djinn way to bend the knee, to accept any master over their own desires. Peace was not to their taste. They had taught the world war, they had armed humans and Nephilim, and now there was no end to it.
The word of the day was Bahamut. Bahamut, the Marid of the Sea, was in open revolt, and every swell in the bay made the watchers flinch, as if he would emerge any minute and swallow them whole. No one knew what had turned him, this normally peaceable djinn who had slept for centuries. Ancient treaties of goodwill were broken. The lords of the First City had sailed ceaselessly into the deep, sending ambassadors, offerings, pleadings for parley. Bahamut answered only with rising waves.
There had been tremors underwater for many months now, small earthquakes that sent tidal waves up over the seawall, rattling the ships in the harbor. Bahamut was causing the earthquakes, testing some fell device. It was said that Bahamut taunted them, penned their great fleet in the slips, particularly galling as Gangaridai had been a maritime power, a far-flung network of trade routes, before the Marid of the Sea had turned against her. Ship captains despaired. Today, one old man, a famous navigator, had hanged himself from his top mast, unable to accept a landlocked world where he could no longer venture into the bay.
The Horologists still inhabited the basement of the King’s Tower. The miasma of their sorcery had spread over more parts of the city. Food no longer rotted. Flowers bloomed for days, lending unearthly color and aching beauty to the scorched walls. Kaikobad could sense the uneasiness of the people as clocks stopped ticking, as confusion reigned over day and night, as hunger and thirst drew down, the urges of life fading, until they were like ghosts, going through the motions. Many fell into traps of repetition, playing the same game of chess over and over again, watching the same plume of smoke circling from mouth to hookah and back again, over the looping gurgle of water. The High King had unleashed some madness, some seductive alteration to the world, stealing upon them in their sleep, imperceptibly enough that they no longer recalled when it had first happened.
Kaikobad, drawn into the tale of the First City, now felt a gnawing despair. He battled to warn them, to tell them to flee, but the gate gave only memories. Perhaps somewhere there was another gate that would let him reach out and touch the skin of the world, but he did not know where, and it did not come to him, despite his prayers. Thoth consoled him in these moments. He had searched for the road himself, for as long as duration had no meaning. The road would take them back if only they could find it, the Charnel Road, the Bone Road—was blood and bone not the very essence of life?
When the watchers of the sea grew tired, they wandered off, and the waves got slightly higher every night, until they touched the lip of the wall and then regularly slipped over, creating a shallow marsh in the low end of the city, a flood at high tide that they had never seen. Unnerved, they barricaded the wall with their belongings, priceless furnishings tossed against the encroaching water, which moved like Bahamut’s will, endlessly dripping, slow, inexorable.
Day after day, nothing happened, but the city drowned. The troubadours sang dirges. Wine was the order of the day, drunk in sorrow on the street corners, for they could all see that Bahamut would never come in cataclysmic fury. He didn’t need to. He would kill them inch by inch, torture them with this slow, ceaseless deluge, and what army was there that could fight this? Young djinn and Nephilim played a game: they stood on the seawall with their field, holding back the water, reversing the tide, and it was a beautiful, noble futility, for their shield would hold for days, for weeks, until a single chink of exhaustion, a small faltering, would let in a drop, a trickle, and the strain would shatter everything, and they would have to start again, the water lapping at their feet half an inch higher. They faced their doom with smiles, with youthful bravado, as if there were nothing to lose.
“We will not fall,” they said to one another, when the sun set and the campfires of Memmion’s army in the burning fields grew oppressive. “The city cannot fall as long as we hold the walls. What does it matter if Bahamut sends the tides? We will be a city of boats.”
Kaikobad wept for them, their lost innocence, and he wept for Indelbed, whom he could not see at all.
CHAPTER 25
Glandular Fever
Indelbed dreamed that wyrms were chewing on his extremities. This was understandable, given that Givaras kept talking about how his legs got eaten. Alternating with this nightmare was a second dream, which consisted mainly of a vision of Givaras sitting in front of a white background, taking a scalpel to his open brain. Indelbed would open his eyes and see the kindly face peering down, curious, enthusiastic, poking and slicing, all the time explaining things with excruciatingly boring scientific detail.
He explained this to Givaras, who dismissed it as his brain trying to cope with the close proximity to an actual proto-dragon. God’s Eye was getting bigger, and the metamorphosis was visible now, with trills growing prominent around the neck, the jaws and snout elongating into something reptilian, the eyes glowing daily with increasing comprehension.
“The real interesting thing is this gland here,” Givaras lectured, after the beast slept following a prodigious, cannibalistic meal. “In insects it would be referred to as the prothoracic gland. This creates the hormones that signal the body to prepare for change.”
“Yes, that’s interesting all right,” Indelbed said from far away. God’s Eye tended to thrash his head around if they got too close. He was getting an exaggerated sense of self now, an incipient megalomania and, with it, some awakening hostility toward his roommates.
“Do you realize that the hormones being released here are literally rearranging the insides of this creature? What wondrous things are occurring within? I wish I could cut him open now…”
“Hush!” Indelbed glared at his mentor. “He can hear. I swear he understands everything.”
“It is very possible that the top of his spine is expanding. Here.” Givaras pointed at the base of the neck, where iridescent scales were growing in beautiful patterns. “It is the beginnings of a higher brain. A perfect place to dissect… I know, I know, not another word on the matter. We can hardly throw away years of work on a whim…”
“Thank you.”
“Ah, if you only knew what temptations I have been resisting,” Givaras said mournfully. “Such opportunities for study…”
“Master, please.”
“Anyway, I have not been idle, like you,” Givaras said. He brought forth a flagon fashioned from the inner membrane of a dead baby rock wyrm. They had, over the years, created a number of ingenious instruments from wyrm body parts, although Givaras tended to gravitate toward the head pieces. “I have been studying closely the incredible physiological changes occurring right in front of us—”
“Be careful he doesn’t bite off the rest of you,” Indelbed said. The thought of being without any company in the pit was horrifying.
“Life has been unfair to you, eh, Indelbed?” Givaras was looking down at him with something approaching compassion. “Losing your mother at birth, taken from your family at a young age and thrown into a pit…”
“I got to see the wyrms,” Indelbed said. “And I got to see the distortion field and turn on the djinn lights.”
“Do you still miss the living world up there?”
Indelbed shrugged. “I miss my dad. And Butloo. And the house. It’s funny, when I was living there, I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I guess things can always get worse. But at least I got to do magic. I’d never have seen magic living up there. I’d never have known, you know, for sure about this stuff.”
“You’re a good boy,” Givaras said.
“Do you think we will really get out of here one day?”
“Perhaps, boy,” Givaras said. “There is no knowing what an awakened rock wyrm will do. It was always a long shot.”
“And you wanted to see a dragon, right?” Indelbed said.
“Yes,” said Givaras. “I so desperately wanted to make one.”
“So did I,” Indelbed said. He patted the djinn on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, if it doesn’t work out. We’ll keep trying.”
Givaras hefted the flagon, passed it over. “I have been extracting the hormones from the prothoracic gland,” he said. “A little at a time, while the wyrm slept. I have purified it with heat and the best of my art.”
Indelbed looked at it blankly.
“I want you to take it,” Givaras said. “In prescribed doses, it mimics the rate produced by the living gland.”
“What?”
“I want to even the scales for you, boy,” Givaras said. “I want to give you a fighting chance. Even if you survive the wyrms and escape the pit, how can you counter the wrath of Matteras? How can you fight off grown djinn who have lived for centuries? Who will protect you, when your own kin sold you out?”
“My kin?”
“Think, Indelbed,” Givaras said. “Who gave you to the Afghan emissary? Who sent you away from your home, where the wards of your father protected you? What was the price for betraying a little boy, whom no one missed?”
Indelbed felt something drop in his stomach, a thick slug of metal in the gut, physically folding him in two like origami, and thoughts rushed through the careful fences of his mind, scattering defenses helter-skelter, and he felt anew every slight and turned face, every little sling, and the coldness of being alone. The natural cheer left him, leaving a yawning nothing, fingers of despair tightening around his throat, until he was convinced. Who left behind would have fought for him? The Ambassador? GU Sikkim? Aunty Juny? They had despised him one and all. His father? Was he even still alive? He tried to remember his face, but found that he couldn’t recall anything much at all.
“What will this wyrm juice do?” he asked, his face tightened into a mask.
“I don’t know,” Givaras said. “I want to give you power. I want you to survive, to thrive in the world. The wyrm is becoming a dragon. What will you become, you offspring of human and djinn? Something hideous, perhaps. Or something beautiful, unique.”
“Will you take it too?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I am afraid,” said Givaras with brutal honesty.
“Will it hurt?”
“I do not know,” Givaras said. “The wyrm appears content, yet he has no nerves in many parts of his body. I have never seen a wyrm change.”
“But you’ve seen other things?”
“Insects go through partial or complete metamorphosis. Grasshoppers, for example, change from nymph to adult with a series of moltings, where they shed their skin and carapace for progressively larger and better-developed bodies. This is a gradual change; there is no need for a cocoon.
“The more advanced metamorphosis is severe. When a caterpillar pupates, the hormones liquefy the insides of the body, destroying everything to make building blocks for a new structure,” Givaras said. “In such a case, the larva essentially ceases to exist and is rebuilt completely into a different creature.”
“So my insides are going to melt, basically?”
“Nothing so drastic, I believe,” Givaras said. “The wyrm, after all, seems to follow a process of partial metamorphosis—gradual changes rather than a complete pupation. Perhaps at some later time, it will enter a phase of radical change and create a chrysalis. For now, however, I believe that the change from rock wyrm to river wyrm will be gradual.”
“And you have no idea what I will become?”
“It is a dragon hormone,” Givaras said with a shrug. “I imagine you will become dragonish.”
“If it hurts a lot will you be able to stop the pain?”
“I could probably turn off the parts of your brain that register pain.”
“And what happens if I become something horrible? I mean like if my brain melts, or I become like some armless, legless slug?”
“I believe I can control the process somewhat, once the changes occur,” Givaras said. “I will attempt to guide your metamorphosis. You have seen my skill with the field. If things are going badly, I will try to purge the hormones from your system. If you become something truly horrible, if you cease to be yourself, I will destroy you. But look on the bright side. You might learn to breathe fire!”
“You think I should do it?”
“You came in here a little boy. Look at you now, grown into a fine young djinn. A little undersized, but that’s probably the diet. A nice, solid distortion field, and excellent fine control, if I say so myself. I have taught you mathematics, philosophy, biology, chemistry, and our djinn language, culture, and laws to the best of my considerable ability. You could not have had a finer teacher, I believe. Still, all of this will count for nothing when Matteras finds you. He will not accept you as a djinn—to him you are something loathsome. Both of us together couldn’t make a dent in his field. He is that powerful. I think the hormone might be your only chance at survival. What have you got to lose?”
“Okay then, I guess I’ll do it.”
It took two days for his body to shut down. The hormone burned a track through his veins, like dragon flame in reverse, dripping through the fine hollow bone needles Givaras had whittled. Other needles had been placed strategically at acupuncture points, to relieve the pain and allow rapid spread of the hormone.
The pain was horrific. It was, for many hours, the only thing Indelbed could think about between screams, which at first he tried to stifle, and then let loose wholeheartedly, under Givaras’s tender administrations. Something grew in his throat like a tumor, a scaly growth that set off panicked shouting, until Givaras took a dragon scale and cut his tongue out, scoring a bloody passage down his windpipe, draining out the blood carefully as it threatened to drown him.
“Don’t worry, boy, you’ll be able to grow it back later,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. Just have to clear that air pipe a bit. Tongues are so useless anyway, eh?”
Each drop entering Indelbed’s veins scoured him, and the progress of the hormone through his body seemed to destroy his organs; he imagined the tissue breaking up, the very cells melting under this virulent onslaught.
Givaras paused the drips occasionally, and this afforded him some temporary relief, although that was merely a dulling of the burning, a time to catalog the old horrors previously perpetrated on him.
By the third day, he had lost all faculties, and even the breaks were ineffectual, for his entire nervous system appeared to be revolting. Barely coherent, he begged his master in gestures to take out the needles, to reverse the process, to hit him on the head with a rock. Givaras explained in depth how it was better to stay awake as long as possible during the first shock, to avert the possibility of sliding into a permanent coma.
At hour eighty, he was delirious and time had no more meaning; he was an unmoored ship swaying on waves and waves of pain, not certain of his origin or his destination. Givaras’s voice was a siren call of lucidity, far away and powerless to help, a mere reminder that he was not alone and this ordeal had some prior logic that was now lost to him.
The hormone itself was winding its way through him, puzzled at the lack of mass, trying to make chemical connections with parts nonexistent. Then, as fever took the host body and the temperature shot up to an almost unbearable level, the hormone began to experience minute alterations within its own receptors, a change caused by the searing heat, an upgradation to a different set of instructions.
At hour one hundred, things began to fit. Instead of the mushy, semideveloped organs of the larval rock wyrm, the hormones now began to recognize the sophisticated tissue of the new host body. They found the hormones of the endocrine system and hailed them like shipwrecked sailors floating in the ocean. They discovered warrior white blood cells, nerve endings, RNA signaling.
The heat-modified dragon hormones swept upstream, past the spine, avoiding the heart and lungs, until it reached the Turkish saddle at the base of the brain, where the pituitary, the master of all glands, quietly resided nestled against the hypothalamus, insignificant in size and demeanor, yet cunningly ruling the growth and subtle metamorphosis of the entire body.
