Djinn City, page 42
“Givaras the Broken,” Rais said, “fortuitously returned to us. And what, Givaras, can you tell us about the ancestors of Matteras?”
“It is whispered behind his back that he is a bastard from the line of ancient Gangaridai. His ancestors were kings,” Givaras said.
“Kings,” Rais said. “Anathema to djinns. And I have heard those rumors too, from Golgoras and others. Matteras, the bastard son of Gangaridai, that most reviled royal line.”
“So edifying, your concern about my ancestry,” Matteras said. “This old canard has been used to beat me for millennia. Matteras, a bastard remnant of the royal line. I do not care.”
“But what Kaikobad found was even more alarming, wasn’t it?” Rais said gently. “Risal ran some very expensive tests on someone’s DNA. As Roger will explain to you in greater depth, mutations carried on the Y chromosome are patrilineal, used to track male lines of descent. I found her musings on it, hidden in her journals, but the tests were so old I couldn’t track down the lab that did them. Luckily, Roger could decipher her findings.”
“Right, ah, Your Excellencies,” Roger said. “The subject appeared to have standard djinn tetraploidy. Mitochondrial DNA did not show anything unusual. The Y haplogroup was part of the hypothetical R2D subclade, the primary characteristic of which is for the subject to produce both haploid and diploid sperm, a most unique mutation. Logically, it is the gene permitting human-djinn interbreeding.”
“The Nephilim,” Givaras said.
Matteras had grown stark. “The Nephilim are a myth. Djinn and human do not produce viable offspring.”
“That is untrue,” Rais said. “Risal and Kaikobad tested a sample. I tested Kaikobad, Barabas, and myself. Kaikobad has the R2D subclade, the so-called Nephilim gene. So do I. It runs in our family. Barabas is a tetraploid, but guess what? He also carries the R2D subclade. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Once a Nephilim male breeds with a pure-blooded djinn, the R2D gene gets into the bloodline, and according to the rules of Y chromosome mutations, all future male heirs will carry it. What an advantage, though—in theory, every male offspring would be able to mate with both humans and djinn.”
“Half-breed offal,” Matteras spat. “Abominations. Misshapen creatures.”
“My cousin was perfectly normal, as you know. The question is, who did Risal test? The subject had tetraploid DNA with the R2D subclade. You see, at first I thought it was Indelbed. Kaikobad has the R2D subclade, it would make sense his son having it. His mother was a djinn, so he’d be tetraploid, exactly what Risal found. But why test Indelbed? They already knew he was hybrid. No, it was you. They tested you. The son of kings. The most powerful djinn in the world. Tell me, Givaras, who was Matteras’s great ancestor?”
“It was the last High King of Gangaridai.”
“And who exactly was the last king of Gangaridai?”
“The Nephilim Kartiryan, the so-called Master of Time. It was all in the royal book, but the original Register of Kings was destroyed after the cataclysm. Republican fervor, you know,” Givaras said. “Risal must have found a copy.”
“You lie! Traitor! Father of lies! You mean to say some human filth was the High King of the First Empire? What djinn would believe you?” Matteras snapped.
“Me? Oh no, poor boy.” Givaras spread his arms toward his fellows. “Memmion. Bahamut. Davala. Beltrex. Elkran. Kuriken. We can all bear witness. We were all there. We all fought the war.”
“Some of us more than others,” Mother Davala said, glowering at Beltrex.
“You are, as I have known from the start, the trueborn descendant of the Nephilim Kartiryan, High King of Gangaridai, and his queen, the Empress-elect of Lhasa,” Givaras said. “Heir to the Throne of Ruin. If the empire stood, you would right now be High King Matteras Kartiryan, the royal union of djinn and man.”
“Cheer up, Matteras,” Rais said. “Your worst fears are realized. But at least you’re not a bastard.”
CHAPTER 50
Requiem of the Great War
Rolling shock waves scattered them like chess pieces falling helter-skelter off an upturned board. The room reacted viscerally to Matteras’s rage, pressure fronts of expanding spells hitting each other with the reek of cordite, enormous flagstones plowing into the air, turning to dust, killing light spawning in the walls. Kuriken spilled free from his iron maiden and lay prone on the ground at an awkward angle. Something struck Memmion in the chest, hard enough to send him groaning back, turning his deck chair to kindling. In the center of the conflagration, barely visible behind layers of power, Matteras roared his fury like a maddened bull.
It seemed to Rais that they would all die, that the entire structure would be obliterated in a moment, and the spells would run loose, tearing up the ground and sky around them, perhaps not stopping until the whole world burned. He could believe now that these djinns had once wrecked the earth. Through the veil of smoke, he saw Givaras stand up, those peculiar legs braced against the pressure, and the Eye of Horus opened on his forehead, streaming clean white light like a crystal, and there was a momentary cessation of everything.
“Enough! Matteras, stop this tantrum. We have much more to speak of! Do you think I have roused all the elder djinn to ruminate on your bloodline? There are more critical things to do!”
“As ever, you poison all that you touch,” Matteras said from behind his screen.
Yet the words brought him back, and Rais watched in astonishment as he somehow pulled everything inside him, his indistinct form swallowing the appalling forces unleashed, lines of power folding like origami into his body. For the first time, Rais appreciated the enormous energies Matteras commanded, why he was the foremost of the djinn. His threats were not idle.
Mother Davala, momentarily upturned, righted herself. “Temper, temper, Matteras,” she cackled with bleeding gums. She patted her amphorae. “You don’t want to upset the little wolf in here.”
“Mock me again, witch,” Matteras said. He was still inside a dark nimbus, the air literally humming around him. Something forked out of his hand and struck her square, sending her skittering back. He clasped his hands together and the darkness tightened around him into a ball. His field was an entirely opaque sphere now, luminous black, gravid, all the more frightening for being so tightly controlled.
“Matteras! Stop!” Rais shouted, getting up off his knees. “Please…”
Matteras stared at him. “You’ve had your fun, emissary, but I think you are done. Perhaps the Nephilim really existed. Perhaps I am tainted with human blood. To separate the truth from the lies of Givaras is beyond even me. If I am to be an outcast, so be it, I accept my fate. I will at least do one last service to djinnkind. These ancient monsters have plagued us for too long.” He called to the captain. “Golgoras. We are on differing sides, but with you, at least, I have common ground. Tell the others what these elders have wrought. Say that I killed them for the good of us all. My only regret is that I will not be able to finish Bahamut. The fate of djinnkind I leave to the rest of you.”
“Matteras!” the Maker said.
“Enough words, Broken.”
The black ball was palpably gaining mass now, keening, buckling the walls of the castle itself. Gravity gave out, bits and pieces started floating up. Something struck the Eye of Horus, and it winked out.
“Matteras!” Rais shouted. “It’s not what you think. You’re not the only one! Think about it. Barabas had the Nephilim gene. Let me test Golgoras. I will bet you anything that he has it too. You’re all like this. Don’t you see? He did it to all of you. You’re all half-breeds. Ask him.”
The roaring ceased for a second. “Tell me, Givaras, what have you done?”
Givaras was dusting himself off, picking up his chair.
“Maker of Broken Things, what have you done?”
“It was war.” Givaras shrugged. “We were desperate. The world was destroyed, covered in ice. Do you know how close we were to extinction? How few of us were left?”
“So you widened the gene pool,” Rais said.
Givaras nodded. “Our population was too small. Unlike these imbeciles, I at least understood evolution. There was no time for Creationist rubbish. We would have lasted a few generations at most, if we had kept to the old ways. I gathered what Nephilim remained, and I bred them with djinnkind, and when they had offspring, I killed the defective ones and then bred the healthy ones with Nephilim once again. Over and over. I fucking bred them like brood mares, and I marked the bloodlines.”
“The minor hunt!” Rais said. “That’s where it came from! It never made sense to me…”
“Yes, that was one of my traditions.” Givaras smiled fondly. “There were only a few of us left, after Gangaridai. We had to change everything, to remake ourselves, to survive. Beltrex wrote the laws and the Lore. His new creed was the sanctity of life. We could not afford to lose a single healthy djinn. Elkran wrote the Code Duello, and we fought to first blood rather than to the death like before. Memmion made the clubs. There would be no more empires, no more kings, ever again. We could not afford the bloodshed. We chose Seclusion and left the business of conquest to humans. Emissary, I have watched your kind spill each other’s blood for the past ten thousand years with immense satisfaction.”
“What happened to the Nephilim?” Rais asked.
“What do you think?” Givaras said. “The Nephilim became the emissaries. We kept the bloodlines tied to us, our ambassadors to the human world. You are the Nephilim, boy, the children of kings.”
“Everything is a lie then,” Matteras said softly. “You broke us in truth.”
“I saved you,” Givaras said. “Hybrid vigor, Matteras. Do you not see how much stronger you are because of it? There was no other way.”
“You bred us like rats,” Matteras said. “We are not the chosen people; we are the offal left from some war you lost. Are there no pure-blooded djinn left?”
“Just us few,” Givaras said. “The last who answered my call.”
“You make me sick. This abomination you have made of us… it’s better that we end it all. If we were to die, you should have let us die. But no, Broken, you must always meddle, always cheat. I am sick of it. This is my final judgment. I will yank the iron core out of this earth, Givaras. I swear, I will end all life on this planet, beyond even your power to fix,” Matteras said. “If you somehow survive, as no doubt you will, you can float in space with the rubble. Do you doubt I can live up to my word?”
“I do not. You have always had that power,” Givaras said with something approaching pride. “Don’t you see? You are the culmination of twenty thousand years of breeding. You are our weapon, our hope for the future. Destroy the world? No, you were made to save it.”
“What?”
“The Great War is not over, Matteras. We are fighting it still and have been for the past twenty thousand years.”
“With whom?” Matteras asked. “Who is this great enemy? Or have you imagined all of this? For I see no enemy here other than you.”
“The enemy is High King Kartiryan and the djinn lords of Gangaridai,” Givaras said, “as they have always been. Let me tell you the story of the First Empire of Djinn and Man. Yes, djinn and Nephilim ruled together. There was not such a gulf between our races then. It was their opinion, those proud lords of Gangaridai, the eternal kings, that they had built the perfect city. They wished to preserve it and indeed to preserve their hegemony of the known world. Alas, time moved against them, even the long-lived djinn, for whom centuries were like single nights. Still, they were happy enough with their rule. Then came the Nephilim Kartiryan, a master magician. He could swim in time as a fish swims in water. He saw far into the future, to a time when the empire would decay and their city crumble. This was not to their liking. Kartiryan and the chosen djinn, the High Lords of the First Empire, made a pact to stop time itself. They would have this world remain static, unchanging, untouched by what men call entropy.”
“It was so,” Memmion said, sitting upright on the floor, panting in huge gasps. “He speaks the truth.”
“It was a horror. What they proposed was to rule the world not for a day, or a year, or a millennia, but forever, unchanging. This was irreversible. We would have been like flies trapped in amber. We resisted, naturally. To change is to decay, yes, but it is also to evolve. They believed that we had been created perfect. I argued the truth: that we had evolved, just as all other life; that we were changing, even with our longevity. I saw what we might become far into the future, something wondrous, something vast and powerful. They would throw that away for their beggar’s alms, their petty kingships. So we fought, the first war of ideology, the Great War, and there was no place on the sidelines. Kemet fought for us, and the scattered folk of Mohenjo Daro, already destroyed by the hubris of kings. The world was sparse then, the djinn spread far and wide in lonely places, yet they came to fight, for or against, and we carried the battle to all the places Nephilim and djinn could reach.
“In the end, in the final battle, only five of us came—”
“Six!” Mother Davala said.
“Six,” Givaras said with a bow. “Davala of the Furies, Bahamut, Memmion, Beltrex, Elkran, and I. So few, those who came to the walls of Gangaridai, and we laid siege, and with us were remnants of the Nephilim and their human hosts, so few, so pitiful. Yet the enemy we faced were even more pitiful, weakened by fighting and desertion. Kartiryan was determined to hold and threatened to destroy the world if he could not have it.
“We fought then, in the final battle on the plains of the Eternal City, the greatest warriors left alive, the champions of men and djinn. You look at me mockingly, Matteras, but you must remember that we were then in the full flush of our power, not old and diminished as we are now. Memmion wore gold, and when he fought he faced the sun so that his reflection blinded all those who stood before him. Bahamut was leviathan; his shadow darkened the ocean so that men cried in terror, thinking he had swallowed all light. Elkran was a sliver of flame, so quick you could not see him, his sword longer than the height of a man, and it was the whisper of death, a feather touch that would kill you. Beltrex, gentle Beltrex, fought with a hammer that could crack the earth, that could change the course of entire rivers with one blow. He smashed mountains and made valleys out of hills. And Davala fought with us, not the crone you see today, but the maiden, beautiful, yes, like the North Star, and terrible, our voice of vengeance, driving madness before her.”
“You have left out yourself, Maker,” Matteras said, “from this roll of honor.”
“I was as you see me now. Yet still I fought and stood when those greater than me fell. You measure by power, Matteras, and I by will. We shall see, in the end, which one is stronger.
“Let me finish. In the end, Kuriken saw sense. He was the First Knight, keeper of the gate, their most fearful warrior. He had killed many hundreds of djinn and thousands of Nephilim. His armor was white, like the northern lands he cherished, blessed with ancient spells, so that no weapon could touch him, and in sunlight, his power waxed and he shone like a star. His spear was made of asteroid metal, the head unbreakable, invested with such power that no armor or shield could block it. While he fought, Gangaridai could never fall. You cannot imagine the terror of Kuriken. He would beggar the power of your princes today. Day and night, he called for us to face him in battle, desperate to finish us, and we avoided him. Finally, I answered.”
“Let me guess,” Rais said. “You cheated.”
Givaras nodded. “You begin to understand me, emissary. He came with his arms, his invincible force, and I came with the broken things I had made. I showed him what we were.”
“The Compendium of Beasts.”
“They call me Maker. They do not know how I got that name. It was on that day. The field is what makes us djinn. So I gave the field to other things. I made djinns, and I showed him, and he could no longer deny the truth: that we are all lost, wandering on the same path, nothing special, no divinity, no destiny but what we make for ourselves, no nobility other than what we claim, frail things cast adrift, ghosts in truth, awaiting some cosmic turn to wipe us off the board. At first he wept, yet I showed him the comfort in that, for we could make of ourselves as we willed, we could fight for ourselves, we could cheat our future. Free will comes at a price, but it is still beautiful.”
“He threw down his arms, you know,” Memmion said. “Though they called him a coward afterward, it was the bravest thing I ever saw. Just cut off his armor and walked away, and no one dared hit him in the back, even though he was naked and vulnerable.”
“When he left, Gangaridai fell in spirit. They were lost,” Givaras said.
“So you won. The First Empire is long turned to dust, as the songs say, their city in ruins in the bay,” Matteras said. “The emissary saw it himself.”
“He saw a pillar,” Givaras said. “Let us speak plainly. You think that Gangaridai was destroyed. It was not. It was removed from this plane by the enemy. They did not like defeat, so they decided to remove their precious city from this timeline—from time itself—and preserve their miserable lives until a more propitious hour downstream. Their magic cracked the earth, ushering in the age of ice. On the eve of victory, we were scattered far and wide, and for centuries, it seemed as if life itself would not survive. Kartiryan did that, in a ritual with twelve High Lords of the Djinn, the so-called Horologists. By the time we recovered, the ocean had reclaimed even the last ruins of the city. Yet the real Gangaridai lives in the other world, untouched, beyond our sight, waiting. They will return one day and test us once again. If you destroy everything, Matteras, they will win. Time means nothing to them. They will wait and return to a fresh new world to despoil.”
“And where is the evidence of this fairy tale?” Matteras asked.
“Why, at the bottom of the sea. They left a gate behind when they sunk the bay, the last road left to Gangaridai, the Charnel Road, made with the bones and flesh of djinn and men,” Givaras said. “It was one door, one way back for them. Bahamut barred it with blood. That lock has been weakening over time. Something has been trying to get out. Do you think he enjoys being a fish? He has spent the last ten millennia guarding it. We owe him a debt far greater than all the dignatas in this world.”
