Djinn City, page 33
“Our clients, you mean,” Hazard said. “Humans do not have clients.”
“Yes, fine, I summoned the clients of Matteras and the many officers in my pay. They could do nothing. The dealing officer will not take bribes, he cannot be threatened.” Dargoman held up his hand. “In isolation, this is nothing. But three days after, our trucks were seized by Narcotics Control, trucks without bills of lading or invoices, carrying hard-earned Yaba pills worth eighteen crore in the Dhaka market. Last week, seven sales of property failed to go through, seven guaranteed buyers who inexplicably canceled their contracts. No explanation given. No phone calls returned.”
“So, bad luck?”
“It’s that damned woman!” Dargoman said. “She’s thrown out that senile fool Sikkim, she’s taken over.”
“You killed her husband, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can hardly expect her to sit idly by. Are you telling me this much-vaunted cabal of yours cannot handle one irate middle-aged woman?”
“We are wealthier,” Dargoman said. “But she has hundreds of relatives. They’re like weeds. And she’s cultivated the most peculiar contacts. She has servants everywhere—peons, guards, drivers—they all seem to belong to her. Our files are vanishing from tables, information lost, titles and deeds stolen from safes. The SEC peon who keeps the mail register has inexplicably lost two of our applications, setting us back a year. The land registry office has lost three of our original deeds. The sitting minister for land has apologized, there’s nothing he can do. Thirty million dollars put at risk, because some land clerk owes a favor to that bitch!”
Hazard was amused. He was always amused, even when he killed men like cockroaches.
“I know where she is hiding,” Dargoman said. “I want your help to smash them.”
“I am hardly interested in humans smashing each other. Kill her yourself if you can.”
“They have that djinn there, you fool!”
Hazard stared at him for a moment, and Dargoman saw madness spiraling in the turn of his pupils.
“I apologize,” Dargoman said hastily, dropping to one knee. “My ardor has betrayed me. Forgive the impertinence.”
“Quite.”
“The djinn Barabas is holed up with them. He does that infernal pup’s bidding, that upstart emissary. To destroy the house will be difficult using our more… regular forces.”
“I will not kill Kaikobad’s nephew, and certainly not Barabas,” Hazard said. “He is a very old friend.”
“They’re all very old friends,” Dargoman said despairingly.
“We are not low men, murdering each other for scraps. We are made of fire, human,” Hazard said. “You would do well to remember that… before I am forced to chastise you.”
“Matteras wouldn’t like that,” Dargoman said. Humiliating, debilitating fear spread from his bowels. He had seen Hazard chastising people before.
Hazard smiled his jackal grin. “Matteras does not speak for me.”
“I beg forgiveness, my lord,” Dargoman said. He prostrated himself for good measure. “I am a humble emissary.”
“That word,” Hazard said. “It is tossed around a great deal. You seem to think it confers some sort of privilege upon you, some mantle of djinndom, as if you were more than human. You are a servant, Dargoman, plain and simple, and sometimes servants require a good beating. Matteras indulges you.”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Forget your petty misfortune. You have been summoned to the Celestial Court.”
“Me? Why?!”
“A case has been lodged against you. By the woman.”
“She’s a civilian!” Dargoman snarled. “By what right can she file a case?”
“The court has accepted her complaint,” Hazard said, “possibly because so many of our jurists owe her money.”
“Her husband was not an emissary,” Dargoman said. “I am within my rights in killing him. It was a personal matter, between humans.”
“Quite. I regret to inform you, emissary, that the complaint is not for your little murder. It is for something much more serious. Breach of contract.”
“What?”
“Apparently you signed a contract with Kaikobad, undertaking the safety of his son. A commission you failed terribly at.” Hazard smoked his cigar. “Did you undertake such a contract?”
“A verbal contract at best.”
“Did you take custody of the boy?”
“You know I did.”
“Then off to court you go. I suggest you hire a good barrister.”
“You must help me—I did it for you.”
“Oh, I’m a terrible lawyer. My talents are… slightly less academic.”
“Matteras then?”
“My dear boy, can you imagine Matteras going to court to defend a human, much less his own cat’s-paw?”
“I’m his emissary, for god’s sake. He can get the case dismissed. His auctoritas is enormous.”
“Best ask him then. Only don’t go tearing off to Siberia. If you think I’m bad, you should see Kuriken. He’ll hang you on a spike and light a lamp inside your gut. I’ve seen him do it.”
“Has Kuriken blessed our cause?”
“They are negotiating. He leads his faction of the conservative party. We must see why he delays. He has been vague. Matteras no doubt will convince him. His auctoritas joined to ours will be enough.”
“And then?”
“Then comes the storm.”
CHAPTER 41
Storm in an Urn
There was an apartment building in the middle of Old Town Gopibagh, purportedly haunted, which rattled during storms with ghostly shrieks. The building was old, before the real estate developers really got going in Dhaka, and thus had not been designed properly. Rather, it had the appearance of an old six-story house partitioned into a dozen or so separate apartments, sharing a common stairwell and wraparound balconies that served as passages.
The house was haunted because one of the apartments belonged to Matteras. He never visited, and no one lived there. The green wooden door was fixed with a very heavy padlock on the outside, impervious to the attempts of a generation of children trying to break in. The apartment seemed to have its own internal climate, which did not correspond to the greater weather patterns of the nation. It gave off great heat and cold alternately, so that sometimes the door was rimed with ice and sometimes steaming with heat.
Ironically all the Old Town people believed in djinns, and had Matteras actually come down and explained what he was about, they would have been perfectly satisfied with him. Instead, it was the cause of continuous speculation, the source of a hundred urban legends, until every lame dog, every missing child, and every unexplained pregnancy was blamed on the apartment, despite it having never manifested any hostile intent whatsoever.
Inside, the apartment had floors stained with red oxide, a very old way of decorating cement. The place was completely empty. Hieroglyphs marked the walls, carved into the plaster, almost invisible to the naked eye, but crowding dark and thick for those with djinn vision. These spells made the interior freezing cold. The source of the heat came from a room farther inside. The apartment was disused except for the central bedroom, which was locked. The door was too hot to touch, and only the efficacy of the spells carved into the wood stopped it from combusting. The heat turned the ice into steam, and the door smoked continuously, adding to the otherworldly atmosphere.
Inside this room were the only two objects in the entire apartment: a large urn made of grayish clay, set upon a low wooden table. Every surface within was covered in hieroglyphs, done in the same hand as the rest of the place, done by Matteras personally in fact, for no other djinn or man knew of this room. These last sets of spells were exhaustive, the work of a master, and the dignatas of Matteras would have gone up considerably had his fellow djinn ever seen them.
The urn gave off great heat, and sometimes it made rattling noises, but it had never moved an inch from its base; in fact it was gripped there by forces unimaginably complex and would never even contemplate moving. The urn was currently full of dirt, good black loam, pebbles, sand, and water. There were hints of odd stuff in there: a hot line of fire, a handful of worms, a few other things.
The urn was ancient and had been subject to huge quantities of magic over the years by various hands, so much so that it was almost sentient now. Its thoughts were glacial, which was good, because it barely had time to register surprise before its innards started shaking and then expanding, and then some strange quirk in quantum space allowed an odd-looking foot to smash through its body and land on top of the table, a foot attached to misshapen legs, and the urn had time to reflect indignation before a second foot also came out, and everything shattered into a thousand shards.
A fully grown djinn stood on the collapsed table, careful not to move, a slight smile on his face. His skin was burned crimson and black, like a striped beast, and he had horns on his head.
“Fucking Solomon,” he said, as he looked at the remnants of the urn.
He sat on his haunches and studied the surrounding glyphs for many minutes, until he found the one he needed. One picture, carved deeply into the floor, was cloven in two, a particularly far-flung piece of clay bisecting it. Thus divided, the meaning of this glyph changed entirely. It was just about enough. He put his finger to the spot and the spell started to unravel. A little white dervish swept through the runes, breaking them down, opening a safe path to the door, then out across the living room to the main gate. The padlock popped open. Givaras the Breaker of Things balanced himself on someone else’s legs and walked out.
Several days later, the urn had almost reconstituted itself into some proximity of a vessel when another body flopped out of n space, shattering the wretched thing once again. This time, used to near-death experiences, the urn did not panic, but resorted instead to a stoic reflection on the generally ill nature of man and djinn.
Indelbed fell to the ground, a smoking carcass, held together by will and a vestigial wisp of the field. After an interminable amount of time, he sat up, because even though he was sickeningly injured, he was not dead. Skin and scales flaked off him, but pain was a distant drum. He was used to pain, and the absence of core fire was a relief to which all other sensations paled. At first he saw only darkness, but when his eyes adjusted to the field he saw black lines surrounding him, trees in a winter forest, stretching in all directions, and superimposed, tessellations of force, tiles of icy power. The field roiled all around, disturbed. There was no way through, only a terrible, leaching cold, frost rimming all the surfaces, forming now on his fingertips.
I was burned and now I will freeze, Indelbed thought. He did not really want to move. The cold was slowing down his thoughts, lulling him into stupor. Idly, he gathered the shards of clay around him, piling them up. It took him a moment to realize that they were like puzzle pieces, glowing with power, the edges literally straining to reconnect. He joined them together, and the urn re-formed, slivers of clay flying back through the air in a temporary reversal of entropy. Indelbed’s blind eyes could see the thing very well, an ancient vessel glowing with power, its field fluctuating as it regained form.
“Hello?” He spoke on whim, not really expecting an answer.
“Thanks,” said the urn. “Really. It would have taken me ages to do that.”
“Ahem, I’m talking to a jar then? A bottle?”
“We prefer urn. Although Solomon, of course, called us amphorae.”
“I suppose I’ve finally lost my mind.”
“There were twenty thousand of us created. I can’t imagine there are too many left. I am an ancient, unique—”
“Was I inside you?”
“Of course. You, the wyrms, the other one. It’s all to do with folding space. You could fit anything into anything, if you know how, which of course Solomon did, being the premier magician of his time. However, they say that those are lost arts now, although if you ask me—”
“Other one?”
“He’s the one who broke me the first time. Walked funny.”
“Givaras!”
“Very abrupt fellow.”
“Where did he go?”
“He found a path through the spells. I was shattered at the time, but I believe I got a good look. That’s the interesting thing about me—”
“Can you show me out? Sorry, it’s just that I’m freezing to death.”
“Oh yes, of course. Would you mind just gathering everything together and really sweeping all the little pieces in? I’d like to come with you; it’s not very interesting over here, although I once spent several thousand years on the ocean floor, but there were crabs, and fish, and sponges, and—”
“Look here, I’ve got it. Hang on, there’s a big piece over there. Okay, I think you’re whole. Hey, so that entire murder pit thing was built inside of you?”
“Yes, it’s all to do with n space. When you start unraveling some of the dimensions, you get different kinds of geometry—”
“So my wyrm is still in there?”
“Well, he certainly did not come out.”
“Good. Come on, urn, you’re up. Show us the way through these spells.”
“Right. I’m on it, Young Master! One false move will destroy us! Well, destroy you. I’ll probably just reconstitute. Still, I’m going to try my hardest! We have to be careful now—the odd-legged one took a long time getting out, I think first left, and then—”
“You’re the best urn Solomon ever built.”
The urn would have beamed had it the facial mechanism to do so.
At four o’clock, while Rais and Maria were speeding across the Pacific, Indelbed was limping from the apartment building in ill-fitting pants and a flood relief blanket, the urn clutched protectively in the crook of his arm. His current ailments were innumerable, and the small cache of adrenaline that had fueled his escape from the ensorcelled room was soon used up. On top of everything, he was suffering from massive sensory overload. The noise hit him like a sledgehammer when he approached the main road—the cars ringing in his ears; the ceaseless street-side conversations; the hollering, shouting, and swearing—the grinding pressure of humanity buffeting him along, keeping him upright even as his feet stumbled over unseen obstacles. His vision was overwhelmed, all that hard-earned skill gone; he was just another blind boy walking the beggar’s road.
When he finally couldn’t will himself any farther, he fell to his knees and let the heels and knees of irritated passersby push him toward a wall. He sprawled there in a daze, burned feet bare, head and body covered in the stolen blanket, shivering. Someone stopped, pressed a two-taka note into his hand. Another man tossed a note at his head. A dog sniffed at him and then ran away barking. After some time, a nearby tea stall owner grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into an alley.
He slapped him a few times, asked him some questions, but Indelbed couldn’t speak coherently, his regrown tongue flopping in his mouth like a dead fish. The tea seller noticed his sightless eyes and stopped shaking him.
“Are you blind?”
“Yeshhh.”
“Beggar?”
“Yes,” Indelbed said after a moment.
“Where are your people?”
“Orphan,” Indelbed said. Not true. I have a father. I had one. I’m going to find him. And if he’s dead, I’m going to kill everyone who did it.
“You look sick.”
“I was burned. It’s not contagious.”
“You can sit in this corner for a bit,” the tea man said. “You can’t beg here. If you come near the stall I’ll beat the shit out of you. You’re scaring away my customers. How much money do you have?”
“What?”
“Do you think taking care of sick people is my job? Give me your money. And that jar. What’s in it?”
Indelbed handed over the crumpled notes he had collected.
“The bottle.” The tea man cuffed him lightly. “Come on.”
“No.”
This time the kick was in earnest, battering him in the ribs. “Give the fucking bottle, beggar.”
“It’s an urn,” Indelbed said. “You can’t have it.”
The tea man laughed, slammed him twice in the stomach, wrested the urn away, and promptly dropped it as it nipped his fingers with frostbite.
“Djinn.” Indelbed grinned through cracked lips. He dribbled out the distortion field, letting the light sparkle on his palm in pretty colors. It was pretty much the extent of what he could do right now.
“Djinn!” The tea man staggered back in fear. He was a believer.
“Where are we?”
“Motijheel, Master. Please, I have children. Don’t…”
“Possess you? Eat you?” Indelbed bared his teeth, stained red from his own bleeding gums. “I’ll take your right arm.”
“What?”
“Cut it off and give it to me. Or do you want me inside your head? I’ll wear your skin like a coat.”
“God save me…” The man started to mumble prayers. He was on his knees now, hands clasped, the very picture of supplication. People were looking at them funny.
“Oh, shut up,” Indelbed said. “Your broken Arabic has no effect on anything. Do me a service, and I will forgive you.”
“Anything, Master, anything.”
“There’s a house in Wari I must get to. Take me there, and your service is done.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Oh, and get me a cup of tea.”
By the time they got to Wari, Indelbed was thoroughly lost. The old houses were gone, supplanted by tall, cramped apartments. The streets were unrecognizable, the roads full of cars now, the old shops gone, replaced by newer, swankier efforts. He knew no one, and no one knew him.
They overshot his road a couple of times, back and forth, the tea seller too frightened to object, until some remnant of decade-old topiary clicked in his head, taking him back to the last time he had left this street. Indelbed stood at the narrow mouth of the alley, feeling very small. It was quieter here, cooler, and his fledgling sight returned, the field stealing around him like a whisper, until he could see the contrails again.
