Djinn City, page 37
“Golgoras needs crew that he can trust. I’m guessing you guys can help each other. Give us a few men, it should square it,” Rais said.
“Hey, man, most of ’em are family, okay? What do you mean give him a few men? Where the hell would they be going?”
“Relax, they’ll just be crewing the airship. It’s mostly routine work. Where are we going? Well, I think I know the djinn who took Beltrex and Elkran. He’s making some kind of move,” Rais said.
“You know where to find them?”
“I’m pretty sure they’ve gone to Siberia.”
“I’m not going to Siberia.”
It took a day to convince Golgoras. Tenoch was sold the minute he saw the Sephiroth slowly take form in front of his eyes, shedding her chameleon tech. Even with the hasty repairs, she was a beautiful, rakish ship, low and predatory. It took Golgoras quite a bit longer.
Golgoras was not a happy djinn. It was bad luck having a woman aboard the Sephiroth. He did not want Tenoch and his armed sicarios wandering the deck. He did not like the idea of transporting a coffin-size crate full of unknown drone tech. He most certainly did not enjoy Roger following him around like an imprinted duckling, asking minute questions about his physiology. But most of all, the one thing he definitely did not want to do was go to Siberia. “I’ll drop you off at the Hub; you can charter something else there.”
“We don’t have time, Golgoras,” Rais said. “Matteras has kidnapped them. I’m sure of it. Who else could it be? Who’s powerful enough and cunning enough to get past Beltrex’s defenses like that? Kaikobad’s house had wards like these, and Matteras somehow took him out ten years ago.”
“And where’s the proof of that, hmm?”
“Well, do you think Beltrex broke his own protection and drilled a hole up the hill? Why? ’Cause he’s afraid of doors all of a sudden?”
“Beltrex is batshit insane. It’s not impossible that he did just that,” Golgoras said.
“It’s on you if they end up in a murder pit,” Rais said.
“I am not his client and therefore not obliged to act.”
“Well, I am an emissary, and it is well within my remit to investigate any suspected kidnapping, regardless of who it is,” Rais said.
In the end, they dropped Tenoch off in Baja and signed six of the sicarios as crew. The contract was 386 pages long, and Rais had to spend half a night explaining it and the intricacies of djinn law to Tenoch. The gist of it was that, in return for providing a minimum of six crew members and round-the-year maintenance and refueling support, the Sephiroth would dedicate every tenth contract to a shipment of Tenoch’s choosing. The remainder of the time, the crew would serve Golgoras in whatever capacity he deemed fit, including combat conditions, although they would receive additional recompense as hazard pay if they did in fact come under fire.
Six men volunteered, officered by Tenoch’s cousin Raul, and were duly inducted. They signed the contract in blood, and Golgoras placed constructs on them to prevent any possibility of sabotage or mutiny. Tenoch also signed the contract in blood as the main beneficiary, and then had the honor of being offered patronage by Golgoras, which he accepted. As Rais explained to him, he was now tied to Golgoras by bonds of honor and clientship, and he was expected to serve his patron in any way possible, with the understanding that in times of dire need, he would be able to call upon a powerful djinn captaining a deadly airship. For the Sinaloa, this was a major coup, and Tenoch disembarked the ship a well-satisfied man. As part of their agreement, he readily supplied the ship with assault rifles, submachine guns, concussive grenades, RPGs, and a stock of six surface-to-air missiles that could be fired from a modified torpedo tube. Two of the new crew members were snipers, and they set up shop at each observation deck, manning cannons that had not been fired in years. Mines were cleaned, the bow and prow guns primed, the grappling hooks waxed and coiled.
The Sephiroth had never been this fighting fit, and Golgoras was pleased with Rais’s negotiations. Any upgrade to his ship was a balm to the captain’s heart, and he was mellowed enough to offer his three passengers a cask of amontillado on the bridge in celebration. He was, however, still adamant. There would be no Siberia.
“Be reasonable, boy,” Golgoras said, clapping him on the back. “One does not simply barge into Kuriken’s castle without an invitation. There are protocols.”
“I’m not telling you to barge in. I’m asking you to just get us there.”
“That’s the same bloody thing.”
“You are under contract. Do you, at this time, formally renege? I will require that in writing, if you please.”
“I do not please!” Golgoras snapped. “And shut up with all the legal talk.”
“Not so fun when you’re on the other end of it, eh?”
“You did good with the Mexican contract,” Golgoras said. “Fair terms, and it gets me out of a jam. Frankly, I don’t trust any Ghuls right now. There are strange noises coming out of Lhasa. If the deal with the cartel works out, we can crew a lot more ships with Tenoch’s men. I’m going to recommend it to Memmion. You’ll get a lot of dignatas out of this. You should be pleased with yourself.”
“Thanks,” Rais said. “I still want to chase after Beltrex, though.”
“I will take you to the Hub. We will see Memmion. You will explain your case to him.”
“We can catch them, Golgoras!” Rais said.
“And then what? He must have come with an airship. Do you think we can take him in the air? With an untested crew? Do you know how strong Matteras is? For all we know he has an army of Ghuls. And what if we get to Siberia? How exactly do you intend to storm Kuriken’s castle? It’s a fucking castle. Kuriken isn’t some senile ancient. He’ll peel the skin off you.”
“Delightful. And how exactly will Memmion help?”
“Oh, if you can convince Memmion, you’re sorted,” Golgoras said. “He has a fucking dreadnought.”
CHAPTER 44
Pipe Dreams
It rained for three days before the first tsunami hit the coast. It was a small wave, only five feet high by the time it crashed into the mangrove forest, which served as a storm wall for the southern coast. There were only a few casualties, more from acts of idiocy than the actual tide. In Bangladesh, there were always a few casualties. The worst affected were the trees. The aftershocks were felt in the countries surrounding the Bay of Bengal. It was unusual seismic activity, underwater somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far from traditional fault lines. Scientists termed it an aberration and vowed to study it further.
Indelbed didn’t mind the rain. It kept him cool. He had fled Wari after the fire in the market. Many people had died. He went back two days later, walking through the remains of charred wood, blackened tin sheets, scraps of cloth, and rotting vegetables, everything laced with ashes and the lingering smell of burned bodies. He knew that smell. Nightmares haunted him from that night. He was struck by remorse and the certitude that there was something alien inside him, some urge to destruction, because he remembered vividly the joy of loosening the fire, the fierce bloodlust, and could not deny that he would do it again, no doubt, if pushed. He almost turned back then, but it was the urn he needed, the jar of earth stacked somewhere in the night guard’s hut of horrors, which contained his cavernous home and his blood brother, calling incessantly to him. It was a desperate idea. He wanted to return to his prison, a place cool, dark, and peaceful.
The hut was abandoned. The boy and his keeper had both left. Police had taken the body of Ramiz. The hut was padlocked from the outside, and a notice hung on the door, declaring the place off-limits pending a court order and investigation. Indelbed broke the lock with a brick, the metal so brittle that it snapped like honeycomb. The room inside was basic, with a bed, mosquito net, cupboard, table, and chair. A small boxy television sat in a corner, a table fan; tin plates, cups, and bowls were stored in a chest. The place had been ransacked a bit, the police looking for any cash, perhaps, but otherwise left intact. The urn was under the bed, rolled to one corner.
“Ah, Master, I knew you would return!” the urn said as soon as he touched it. “I knew it! I said, ‘The Young Master wouldn’t leave me on this dirty floor, rolled up like a flower vase…’”
“Sorry about that, I had a bit of a problem with the locals,” Indelbed said. “In fact, I wanted your help with that…”
“Master! Why, I would be delighted to help! I can name the ninety-nine djinn Solomon kept in perpetual slavery, I can give you the recipe for the special Halwa he ate on Wednesdays, I’ve got a pretty good idea about the technique he used on his favorite concubine, which used to make her squeal, I can—”
“It’s a bit of a rush, actually. The police might be after me. I want to go back inside.”
“Back inside?”
“Into the murder pit. You said it was deactivated, right? Does that mean I can come and go? Without breaking you, I mean?”
“Well, theoretically…”
“Can’t you teach me?”
“You’d have to master folding n space,” the urn said doubtfully. “It took Matteras years to prepare the cave and even longer to fold core fire.”
“I can see the field. Not just spells and runes and permanent constructs, I mean I can actually see the free movement of particles, even when they’re not being distorted,” Indelbed said. “My eyes use the field particles to see instead of photons.”
“Oh. Well! What a stupendous talent, Master! Even Solomon could only see with regular light! If only I had eyes, I would use them to look into your magical orbs—”
Indelbed was forced to stuff the urn into his blanket at this point, because people were looking at him funny. His clothes were ill fitting because he had stolen them, and his blanket was covered in soot and very likely worse things. He walked barefoot and stank. He looked like a beggar, not one of the prosperous ones either, but the mentally ill kind who were covered in filth and really homeless. It rankled. His house was right there, occupied by djinn, and no one even remembered him, not even Butloo. It was as if he and his father had been erased, their home, their lives, just brushed out. He was obsessed with the house, felt a visceral need to retake it.
Without it, he supposed he was a beggar. Over the past three days, all of his food had actually come from begging. He loitered around the street stall restaurants at night, and they often paid him to go away; he never took money, asking instead for the food left over on the dirty plates—invariably they gave him that and more, disgust warring with pity. He supposed long ago he would have died of shame rather than eat like this, but he had spent the last ten years eating wyrm meat, so leftover rice seemed like a step up.
Food was harder to come across during the day, however, and there was a greater chance of being recognized as the blind black boy who started fires. He walked swathed in his blanket, despite the heat, and avoided lingering anywhere. He had found an empty lot that was stacked with large concrete pipes, kept there by contractors installing new storm drains. He slept inside one of them. It reminded him of a tunnel. The second night someone attacked him, trying to drag him out by the foot, but a quick shove of the field sent the assailant sprawling. He slept badly, the darkness crowded with nightmares of burning men, the field always on, a whisper of madness, but he was used to that.
He did not go to the pipes until dark. It was dangerous to stay there for too long, because while the night guard tolerated street people sleeping in them at night, the road contractors during the day would most definitely not appreciate people setting up permanent habitation. By the third night in the pipes, he had set out his route, identifying several shady spots where sympathetic vendors let him sit on the footpath and two abandoned buildings where he could sneak in for a nap. Food and water were from begging and in meager portions; he was not too disturbed by a diet that would have caused starvation to more prosperous persons.
That night, he took stock inside his pipe.
I have nothing, he said to himself, other than this urn. Ironic, that my only possession was given to me by Uncle Matteras, who imprisoned me for no reason. I am at an absolute zero. I fell into that hole with my luggage and a cell phone. I have left those behind too. I have nowhere to go, and soon perhaps my escape will be noticed, and the djinns will start looking for me. If I stay in the street for too long, I will eventually get into trouble. Someone will try to rob me, or rape me, or beat me. I will hurt them, and then the police will know it was me who set the fires. I am all alone in this world. My father is dead. He must be. He would never have voluntarily left the house. Or he is still in a coma. It is all the same, I am truly an orphan.
My family sold me to the djinn. My master left me to die. No one recognizes me, not even Butloo. There is no one in the whole world who will help me, and many who will gladly kill me.
I wish I could go back to the murder pit. I wish God’s Eye was beside me. It is pathetic, that I am free and long for my prison. That’s the little boy talking. The little boy is no good. He’s just going to crawl back into the hole and hide. I’m going to be the dragon. Givaras thought I’d burn, but I lived. I am the dragon. I’m going to take back my house. I’m going to kill the djinn inside. I’m going to find Matteras and kill him. And then I’m going to find Givaras and stuff him back in the urn. I’m going to feed him to God’s Eye. I am the dragon. You’re all going to pay.
He went to sleep cradling the urn and dreamed of burning in core fire.
The second earthquake hit the bay early that morning. Tremors were felt all the way to Dhaka, waking up infants and setting the dogs barking. The pipe adjacent to Indelbed swayed alarmingly and finally rolled off, nearly crushing a little street boy sleeping nearby. Indelbed himself was cocooned inside his field and did not feel anything. In the bay, near the underwater ruins of Gangaridai, a great school of fish watched the disturbance with obvious irritation. The epicenter was at the northern subduction plate near the coast of Myanmar, where for aeons, one plate had been slipping under another with little fuss, at a rate slow enough to be largely unremarked.
The school had sacrificed some of its members to investigate the phenomenon, and before they died, they had reported a large field disruption at concentrated points along the fault line, causing periodic eruptions, where thousands of tons of rocks were ejected from the overlaying plate, ultimately creating the tsunamis. The second of these great waves, generated by a quake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale in Myanmar, was much larger than the first, measuring over twelve feet from trough to crest and traveling over 250 kilometers per hour from the center, a wall of energy that shot through the ocean like a cannonball, wrecking itself on the already storm-ravaged coast.
This time, the trees were not the only casualties. Over a thousand people died in the coastal region, either drowned by the wave, or buried by the tremor, or destroyed by the ensuing storm. Geologists and oceanographers came from all the neighboring countries, fitting the current activity to their working models, trying to predict the next big one. Reputations were made as this paper or that proved to be correct; the consensus was that the hitherto peaceful fault line had built up intolerable stress over time, and this was far from the end. Excited historians claimed that this was exactly how Atlantis, or the great antediluvian civilizations, had gone down, and National Geographic discussed sending a dive crew to see if it could spot any sign of volcanic activity.
Government agencies rushed about, provisioning storm shelters, sending warnings, collecting stocks of biscuits and saltines and blankets.
Bahamut, who had seen the power being expended underwater briefly with his own eyes, sat in his watery home with his fin on the trigger, and patiently waited for someone to come rescue him from his intolerable predicament.
The journey to the Hub was long. Roger spent the entire duration following Golgoras, watching his every move. He volunteered for every task, proving to be something of a mechanical savant, even coming up with a new calibration of the gas ratio, forcing the captain to grudgingly acknowledge that he was a useful fellow. By the end of the journey, he would be widely recognized as de facto first mate, even by the cartel crew.
Maria spent the journey learning to fire a gun, with off-duty sicarios happily teaching her how to strip and load assault rifles. In private, she and Rais explored the workings of the invisible knife. This was their secret weapon, their ace in the hole, for it was clearly a djinn killer, an assassin’s tool, probably the only thing they had that could hurt Matteras in case it came to a fight.
Knife was a loosely accurate name for what was essentially a formless, invisible object. As Maria had observed earlier, it seemed to hover not just out of sight, but out of existence entirely, a sort of potential lethality waiting to be called into being. She kept it leashed to her wrist, for it was liable to get lost altogether. The weapon itself was almost like a whip. It seemed to hit about a foot in front of her fist when she threw a punch, making five little ripples in the air, micro-disturbances that Rais could see using his glasses. They had tested this once against Barabas from a safe distance, and the knife had shredded his field. It was similarly efficacious against mundane objects, shattering wooden posts, even gouging five deep rents in a steel plate.
“Last resort, right?” Rais said, watching her attack the decking from a safe distance.
“Yeah,” Maria said. “Like Raul said, no point having a weapon if you can’t use it.”
“Right,” Rais said. “Please take it easy on the ship.”
“This thing is awesome,” she said. “I’m going to stab Dargoman with it when I get back home.”
“Yeah, but right now you’re about to make a hole in the hull. If Golgoras comes in here he’s going to have a heart attack.”
“Rais, there’s been more storms at home,” Maria said. “I’ve been getting updates.”
“Dhaka?”
“Streets are flooded, but no extensive damage yet,” she said. “There are hurricanes and tsunamis hitting the coasts, though. A lot of casualties in Cox’s Bazar.”
