Djinn City, page 43
“Bahamut,” Matteras spat. “We will go visit him to determine the truth of this. I will see with my own eyes this dread road.”
“We will go,” Givaras said. “Your disruption of the earth’s mantle has weakened the seals further. Bahamut will need our help. See for yourself what you have wrought.”
CHAPTER 51
Return of the Dragon
Boss Kid cycled up to the barricade, pulling a vegetable cart. This was essentially a three-wheeler with a flatbed on the back, loaded up with baskets of fresh produce. He had nothing suspicious, but Abdul recognized him at the check post and stopped him.
“You’re the kid from the pump.” Shotguns swiveled on him. Juny’s men were alert and well trained, all of them ex-military.
“Supply short,” Boss Kid said. “We selling vegetables now. Whole cart for the big house. Cheap cheap.”
“He’s telling the truth, Abdul,” one of the guards said, touching everything. He was a fatty.
“Check it all.”
They tore apart his stacks, then the baskets, and even checked the underside of his cart.
“What’s this?” Abdul was staring at the urn, carefully nestled inside a bunch of cauliflowers.
“Mustard oil,” Boss Kid said. “From my village. Best stuff. Make tehari.”
Fatty rattled the urn and then took a deep sniff. “It’s mustard oil, all right. Let him through, Abdul, we can tell the cook to make tehari.”
“Go with him, drop the load in the kitchen, and walk him back,” Abdul said. “Keep an eye on him.”
“He’s just a kid,” Fatty said.
“He’s a drug dealer,” Abdul said. “Go.”
They went around the back to the kitchen entrance. The mad cook from before had been replaced with Juny’s own. The little veranda in front of the kitchen door, where all the peeling was done, was much cleaner now. There was a little TV there for the kitchen staff. A couple of women were making ginger and garlic paste with mortars and pestles. Boss Kid unloaded everything in front of them. The cook watched for a while and silently approved the shipment. Boss Kid handed him the bill and sat on his haunches in one corner. He would wait for the money. He set the urn down carefully on the floor beside him. When no one was looking, he unstoppered the mouth and put the mustard-soaked cloth in his pocket. In a soft whisper, the urn started to talk.
Indelbed stepped out without breaking the urn. He had been practicing. He was good at folding space now. He had stuffed over a hundred bodies in there during the past month. The smell of the house hit him hard, brought him down to one knee. He was in the kitchen. Everything was different, everything seemed the same. The mad cook was gone, fired or retired. This new one wore a smart uniform and even a hairnet. One of the sous chefs saw him and screamed, her ginger-flecked hand going to her mouth. She came at him with her kitchen knife, a big, circular scythe-like device used to slice herbs and vegetables.
Indelbed threw a fist of air at her, and she rattled against the door. The cook threw a pot at him and ran from the kitchen, sandals slapping flat-footed against the floor. Indelbed stepped into the center of the room, and the lines of spells shimmered in the walls and across the floor, runes overlaid on one another. They converged thick upon him, snakes of ink suddenly woken up, sniffing him, humming with lethal intent. He stood still and let the script crawl over him, the constructs like little spiders, and they remembered at last who he was and let him go.
It was like walking through soup. Every step was crowded. His senses were overwhelmed by the lines of power crisscrossing everywhere, layers upon layers of protection. He touched the walls as he walked; they were cleaner now, less damp, freshly painted. Whoever lived here was taking care of the place.
“Good kitchen,” Boss Kid said, evaluating the appliances with a professional eye. “All new.”
“We only had the gas stove and an old fridge,” Indelbed said. “Someone rich lives here now.”
The cook had been making beef curry. An enormous pot was still simmering on the industrial six-burner stove, a gleaming chrome hood whirring away above. The smell was intoxicating. Boss Kid opened the lid and had a taste.
“It’s good.”
“We never had this much meat in the kitchen,” Indelbed said. “It was mostly rice and dal. On Eid, I remember, everyone would send raw meat, and the mad cook would make a feast. Our freezer never worked well, so she’d cook it all up, and we’d eat it like kings for however many days it lasted.”
“Khan Rahman all rich,” Boss Kid said with contempt. It was a well-known fact that all Khan Rahmans were loaded.
“Not us,” Indelbed said. “But yeah, the others were.”
“You had big house,” Boss Kid said. “You had cook. You rich.”
“I guess, if you put it that way.”
“Better than pipe.”
They walked up a winding passage, past an abandoned sitting room, on toward the front of the house. This was the corridor to the dining room, the floor worn by thousands of trips by Butloo and the cook carrying food and dishes back and forth, a window with mismatched glass letting in some daylight. It was still grimy, less so than before. Someone had taken a scrubbing brush to the walls and floor, trying to eradicate years of careless footfalls, relocating several tribes of spiders.
There were circular scuff marks all along the walls, from when Indelbed had spent months practicing batting, Butloo slow bowling at him for hours on end with a taped tennis ball. His ambition that year had been to break into the national cricket team. Indelbed traced his fingers along the wall at waist height, remembering the line they had drawn in pencil. Balls hit over the line were considered caught out.
“We broke the window once, playing cricket,” Indelbed said. “I thought my father would kill me, but he said he had done the exact same thing when he was a boy. Grandfather had thrashed him, apparently. Most of the time he was drunk, you know, but that time he was great.”
“At least you had father,” Boss Kid said. “Better than nothing.”
They reached the end of the corridor, and he could hear people in the dining room, the cook babbling to someone, the sound of booted feet. Boss Kid crouched behind him, wielding a kitchen knife. Indelbed opened the door and got a shotgun blast in the chest. It was buckshot, twenty-seven round balls per shell, and they hit him at almost point-blank range, dropping him. He scrambled to his feet, and pellets hammered into his back like bits of molten lava. He gasped, trying to crawl back into the corridor, Boss Kid already retreating. It was Fatty from the gate. He didn’t look so comical now. He followed Indelbed, continuing to fire, peppering the mosaic with shots, hit and miss, until the barrel was barely two feet from his head.
“It’s my house,” Indelbed said, turning. “Mine. You have no right!” He grabbed the barrel and pulled, yanking the gun away, and opened his mouth to shout, but what came out was a gout of fire, and the man’s face just melted off, crusting black like the edges of barbecued meat.
Indelbed stood up, and the bits of shot fell off his body, his scales rustling back into place, the little dents smoothening out. The buckshot had only bruised him. The body thrashed before him, and the room filled with oily black smoke, the smell of roasting flesh. Boss Kid went over, looting Fatty for weapons. He got the shotgun, which was a shortened double-barrel pump action, a riot gun, but still almost more than his arms could manage. There was a bandolier of cartridges, which he looped twice around his shoulders.
The great table was on fire, slowly starting to sag in the middle. Indelbed noticed that someone had replaced the old chairs with a matching set. No doubt Juny had grand dinners here with actual food. Perhaps she laughed at the Doctor, at how badly he had got things wrong. He felt a surge of hatred for her. What right had she to get rid of his furniture? Indelbed had liked those mismatched chairs.
“You spat fire,” Boss Kid said. “Why you no say you do that?”
“What? Oh. It just happened.”
Boss Kid was wrapping a napkin around his mouth and nose. “We could have burned this house from the outside,” he said. “Now we in it when it falls.”
“We have to go upstairs,” Indelbed said. “The djinn is up there. I can feel him.”
Boss Kid shrugged. “You go first. You bulletproof.”
They found the living room deserted, doors open. Everyone had run. It was crowded in here, furnished with desks and chairs like an office, computers, cell phones, and thick files everywhere.
“They running business here,” Boss Kid said, impressed. “Big Khan Rahman business.”
Indelbed frowned. “Strange place to have an office,” he said. “Back in the day, none of the family would ever be caught dead coming here.”
Boss Kid was rummaging through the files, looking for cash. “You want to take papers?” he asked.
“What’s the point?” Indelbed asked with a cracking laugh. “Neither of us can read.” I can’t read anymore, Givaras you bastard. You know how hard it was to get my father to teach me how to read? I’m going to eat your eyes when I find you.
He looked around the office—all these signs of industry, the whitewash on the walls, something wholesome in the air, as if cleansing light had been streamed into every dark crevice—and felt an odd sense of dislocation, that perhaps he should put down his tools and walk away from this venture, that despite his earnest ten-odd years of longing, the house had grown up in his absence and moved away from previous delinquent childishness. This place felt adult, mature, imbued with an optimistic esprit de corps that had been lacking in their little domestic triangle of master, son, and servant.
He almost left then, almost called off this fight. It was affection for the house itself, regret that he had already set fire to the dining room, causing damage the place could ill afford. Unfortunately, Boss Kid was made of sterner stuff. His laser focus was on the mission, and he had no compunction about setting fires or shooting people. To him, vengeance was a sacred duty; slights had to be answered, cosmic ledgers balanced—this was the code he lived by, and he could not fathom hesitation or ambivalence.
Propelled by Boss Kid, they climbed the stairs side by side, Indelbed leaning on the boy because he still couldn’t do stairs properly, couldn’t judge depth at all. They got as far as the landing and paused, as Indelbed tried to bolster his faltering courage. He could hear them talking upstairs, the djinn and some woman. Juny? The djinn reeked power, giving off waves of distortion that he could clearly see, and his stomach clenched in atavistic fear.
“Something got past the wards,” the woman was saying.
“I can feel him,” the djinn said. “It’s not any djinn I ever met. It feels like some kind of beast.”
“Beasts don’t break into houses, Barabas!” the woman said.
Indelbed stood on the steps, hesitating, suddenly a little boy again, unable to face down whatever terrors waited above. Something big came bounding out of the second floor, throwing them back down the stairs with a gust of wind: a great bearded red-eyed beast, black hair flailing, huge across the chest and stomach, literally belching with power, the distortion field flattening everything in his way so that the wooden railings all around him splintered and cracked as if little invisible elves were taking axes to them.
It was the djinn himself, the Ifrit haunting his house. Indelbed recognized his scent on the runes, those lines of magic meant to keep him out, and something like rage at last flared inside him, bringing the delicious, otherworldly chaos of the dragon. He got back to his feet, aches and pains forgotten, adrenaline and dragon hormones rushing around his body like it was an obstacle course. In these moments, he realized he was broken, this murderous coolness that severed the connection between his brain and his conscience a sign of onrushing atrocities; this was deep work Givaras had done on his mind, monstrous urges for monstrous powers.
They came together like two bulls, and Indelbed was tossed back, unprepared for the huge, brutal push of the field. Furniture crumbled all around them. The djinn’s field rolled on top of him, trying to paste him on the floor. There was no time to be fancy. It was a simple shoving match with air, their fields ionizing where they overlapped, filling the room with electricity. Boss Kid was brave. He popped up with his gun, shot at the djinn point-blank. It did nothing to him. The Ifrit flung out a hand, and the boy was wrenched into the far wall, making the plaster crack with the impact of his slight frame.
Givaras had been right. Indelbed could barely keep his shield up. His world shrank to a few feet around him, almost opaque, seconds from contracting further into nothing. His field was callow, untested in actual combat. In the haze of overlapping distortion, his altered sight was throwing him off and he kept stumbling on debris. It was unfair. None of his strikes even got off the ground. It was all he could do to draw breath. This nameless djinn was going to pulp him. Givaras had been right. But then, Givaras had taught him to cheat.
Indelbed made one last effort, a supreme push, not to attack, but to escape. For a second he dove under the wrecking ball of the djinn’s field, deflecting it up, skidding out underneath, as he had practiced with Givaras for years.
The djinn smiled, reoriented himself. It was only a temporary reprieve. He seemed to be enjoying the contest. He could tell that Indelbed was done. Massive power forked from the djinn’s fists in a finishing move, reaching for his throat, his heart, his lungs—all the soft places—a killing blow, but Indelbed laughed, because it wasn’t enough; he was dragon inside, his organs weren’t in the right places, the old frailties gone, and he needed only time to unstopper the urn and call for his brother. God’s Eye was not shy. The goad of so much power was an aphrodisiac for him, a call for gluttony, and he came ravenous to the feast, folding out of the urn like dark origami. God’s Eye was enormous now, his reptilian head flaring out, the maw still circular like a rock drill, eyes snapping with hunger, shooting forward like a freight train at the djinn.
The Ifrit stared at it, stunned. No man or djinn had seen a grown earth wyrm in at least ten thousand years. His enormous power contracted into a shield, as he instinctively tried to stop the impact. But rock wyrms ate power, they swarmed it, and God’s Eye was something else now, a swarm unto himself. His momentum punched through the bubble, the shield flaying his head, cracking the plates around his neck, but it wasn’t enough.
The wyrm drilled into the djinn regardless, those teeth tore into his fat body, they chewed him up, and Indelbed laughed as djinn blood laced into the air and covered him in gore. He could hear nothing, only the blood thumping in his skull and the keening of his brother, as the wyrm twitched and shook in the throes of some kind of ecstasy, his thrashing tail wrecking the place further. Indelbed fell to his knees, exhausted.
“Stop!” a voice shouted, his aunt’s voice. “Murderer! How dare you kill Barabas!”
She didn’t recognize him. She couldn’t tell. He had still cherished a hope that someone would know him, that someone would welcome him back with open arms. She was standing at the top of the staircase. He remembered the day she had sent him away with false promises, pretending to care, standing at the same exact spot, watching him leave with a stranger. Nobody had wanted him, and they had all just thrown him away finally.
Something broke in him. All the hurt of the past twenty years rushed to the tips of his fingers. He felt fire pouring out of his skin, his mouth and eyes and every pore, as if that was all he was made of. It was the dragon taking over, scrambling his brain, stretching his neurons with the humming lust for wreckage. Conscious thought was a distant thing, a thin skin floating atop a volcano. He hit out with a scream, a solar flare of rage directed almost at the house itself. Windows and doors all around him burst, the walls cracked, even God’s Eye was flung aside, his heavy body cutting a swath through the remaining furniture.
The stairs collapsed completely, and he saw her tumble, hitting her head on bricks, falling rubble crushing half her skull in. Blood leaked everywhere, and he felt a cold horror trickle over him, staying his hand. The dragon rage winked out. He felt abruptly human again, and at that moment, he would have taken it back, he would have swallowed the hurt, undone everything. He stood over her, afraid to touch her, watching her eyes blink. Her mouth moved, and recognizing him at last, it seemed that she smiled.
God’s Eye heard his keening cry and slithered over, encircling him, a rough comfort, two blind brothers mourning the dead. Someone tripped the edge of his field. He jerked his head up, saw Butloo running at him, silver tray in hand, hunched low to the floor. He got up to greet him, to explain, when the shotgun barked behind him, a thunderous blow, and Indelbed could literally see the streaks of buckshot split the air, hitting the old man square in the chest, sending him skittering back. Boss Kid limped up, pumping the gun, his face bloodied and expressionless.
“Stop!” Indelbed shouted. “Stop! Don’t shoot!”
“He got a weapon,” Boss Kid said.
“It’s not a weapon, it’s a fucking tray,” Indelbed said. He limped over, praying. God’s Eye rustled after him, picking up on his distress.
Butloo was flat on his back, the tray clutched across his chest. His face was bloody, but his eyes blinked open when Indelbed approached, and his face twisted in fear.
“Butloo!” Indelbed cried. “It’s me! Indelbed.” He thrust his face close, not knowing that it was a frightening thing, burned black, riven with scars, eyes crosshatched with fine lines.
“Choto Sahib?” Butloo took a long, disbelieving look.
“You don’t look human,” Boss Kid said helpfully.
“I broke the window in the corridor when I was seven, playing cricket,” Indelbed said. “And you took the blame, except Father never got angry at all. You used to mend my clothes with needle and thread, except the thread was always some weird color, and I’d have the strangest lines all over.”
