Djinn City, page 44
Butloo scrambled to a sitting position. He reached for Indelbed’s face. “Choto Sahib, what have they done to you?!”
“Djinn threw me in a hole, and djinn burned me,” Indelbed said.
“But we have been looking for you!”
“Impossible,” Indelbed said. “Aunty Juny and the Ambassador sold me to that Afghan! Matteras was waiting for us in Mirpur. He put me in prison with a mad djinn!”
“Choto Sahib, you have killed your aunt!” Butloo wailed. “She was fighting the Afghan. She was fighting Matteras! The djinn you killed was on our side!”
“I don’t believe you,” Indelbed said, a deep pit of anxiety eating into his guts. “You’re lying, just like them.”
“Choto Sahib, remember the phone she gave you; she paid the bill in advance for twenty years,” Butloo said. “She kept your room the same as the day you left, hoping that you would come back. Choto Sahib, she brought your father here!”
“He’s alive?” Indelbed grabbed the old man. “Where?”
Butloo dragged himself up, wincing with pain. Boss Kid shrugged in apology and lent him a shoulder.
“He’s up there,” Butloo said. “You and the snake have destroyed the house. The roof is starting to go.”
“Is he still in a coma?”
“He never woke up,” Butloo said. “Madame Juny took care of him.”
“We should get out,” Boss Kid said. The fire from the dining room was spreading this way, smoke and heat adding to the carnage. “Khan Rahman house going to fall down soon.”
“Wait here,” Indelbed said. “I won’t be long.”
He launched himself in the air, over the smoldering ruins of the staircase, using his field to push off the ground. His skills were imperfect, and he ricocheted off the wall, but he shrugged off the scrapes and bruises. He burst into the first door, found his father lying on a hospital bed, dressed in a spotless white kurta, looking far healthier than he had a decade ago, almost untouched by time. Indelbed gathered him up, breathed in the clean smell of laundry detergent and disinfectant soap.
After a long moment he lifted him over his shoulder and staggered out, his slight frame barely taking the weight of the Doctor. He somehow made it down again, half falling into God’s Eye’s coil. The wyrm circled him protectively.
He found Butloo dragging Aunty Juny’s corpse out of the wreckage. They laid the two bodies side by side, one dead and the other sleeping, and Indelbed contemplated the awful sequence of events that had brought him back to this place.
“We cannot leave them here, Choto Sahib,” Butloo said. He laid a piece of cloth over Juny’s head. “You shouldn’t have killed her.”
“I’m sorry, Butloo,” Indelbed said. “I’m… I’m not the same kid anymore. I don’t think I’m fully human. I should not have returned. When the fire comes, I can’t feel anything, just a roaring in my head like some kind of engine going off. It takes an effort to stop it. We won’t leave her here. We will bury her somewhere special.”
There were fire engine sirens outside, the yelling of neighbors, police. Someone was shouting into a walkie-talkie just outside the main door.
“We go outside,” Boss Kid said, tugging at his sleeve. “You breathe the fire on them. Fatafat, all gone. The snake can eat the bodies. No body, no problem.” He seemed taken with the wyrm.
“No,” Indelbed said. He couldn’t take any more burned flesh. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I have a better idea. I’m going to take everyone to a safe place.”
“No place safe in Wari, after what you done,” Boss Kid said with relish.
“This place is not in the city,” Indelbed said. “I don’t think it’s in this world, actually.”
It had been a mistake, trying to pick up his old life. He had made everything worse. Monsters could not return home and expect to be welcomed with open arms. Givaras had understood that. Indelbed belonged underground, far away from burning bodies.
He picked up the urn and bought a ticket home.
CHAPTER 52
The Dark World
While Juny was dying and the House of Kaikobad was falling to ruin, the Sephiroth was speeding unseen over Bengal, swinging low enough at Rais’s request to give them a view of his waterlogged country. The city was flooded, the tops of cars visible as they trailed Vs through the muddy brown water like geese, now and then a brave soul with pants hitched up over his knees jumping across pieces of high ground. Schools, offices, banks, everything was closed, a typical holiday atmosphere reigning for the first few days of any natural disaster. In a week, money would run out, rice supplies in the house would grow scarce, and people would start to suffer. Right now, the rooftops were full of citizens watching the rain.
“I can’t reach the house,” Maria said. “I can’t get your mom.”
“Maybe the phone lines are down,” Rais said.
“I’ve got three bars and Internet,” Maria said. “Something’s happened. Even Butloo isn’t answering. We should stop and check.”
“We can’t,” Rais said after a moment. “I don’t know how long these guys can stay on point without fighting again.”
The dreadnought, coming up behind them, was carrying Givaras, Memmion, and the still weakened Kuriken. Beltrex, Elkran, and Davala were on the Sephiroth, ensconced in the bridge with Golgoras, ostensibly to keep him company, in reality ensuring that Matteras did not change his mind and attempt to take the ship. Matteras was in the rear of the airship by mutual consent, in one of the passenger cabins. Neither party seemed eager to interact, and it fell on Rais to carry messages between the two regarding mundane matters such as breakfast and dinner menus.
The weather became nastier. Rain and wind buffeted the airships. The radio had already informed them of mounting casualties, the entire coast wrecked, countless mangrove trees uprooted in the Sundarbans, and the eminent loss of power for large parts of the city. Rais had voiced his concerns to Matteras, but the djinn had just shrugged. He had stopped his devices. As far as he was concerned, this was just bad weather.
Bangladesh was only 147,500 square kilometers. They zipped across it in half a day, even at the dreadnought’s ponderous speed. The coastal areas were less pleasant. Many villages had been destroyed, the loss of life minimized only by the fact that this was not the first tango for any of these people; they took the hurricane signals seriously, they knew when to abandon their homes and which storm shelters to go to.
Over the bay, they found a steady patch of air above the clouds, and Rais understood Memmion’s plan. The Sublime Porte gently lowered altitude until it was hovering directly above the water. After some apparent fiddling around, the entire lower hull clicked open, and an aluminum cigar fell into the water, eventually settling into a half-submerged level. The hatch up top opened, and they could see Memmion standing on deck, waving at them.
“What the hell is that?” Roger asked, eyes bulging.
“It’s a full-spec Project 971 Shchuka-B first-gen Russian nuclear sub,” Golgoras said with obvious jealousy. “Russians called it the K-284 Akula. It was decommissioned in 2001, supposedly to save costs for the cash-strapped navy. Memmion somehow got his hands on it intact, weapons and all. He rebuilt the hull of the Sublime Porte to accommodate the entire sub as the lower deck. It’s powered by the OK-650 pressurized water reactor, as well as a steam turbine. Memmion retrofitted it to power the entire airship. It’s the only nuclear-powered airship in the RAS fleet.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Rais said. “I don’t suppose the Sephiroth has a sub attached?”
Golgoras gave him a dark look. “He’s got spell work over every inch of the outer shell,” he said. “The damn thing weighed over eight thousand tons without ballast. It was a hell of a job getting it airborne. Now it floats like a butterfly. Thing’s so spelled up it could probably fly around without the damn balloons.”
“What now?” Rais asked.
“We go down there using a rope ladder,” Golgoras said.
In his moment of crowning glory, Roger was given the key to the Sephiroth and sworn in as acting captain. Golgoras had suffered endless pangs of doubt over this, but the lure of seeing the wondrous gate to Gangaridai had proven too strong even for him. He had tested Roger relentlessly throughout the journey, and finally concluded that he could just about be trusted to fly the Sephiroth in a holding pattern above the bay, awaiting their signal.
The climb down was perilous, but Golgoras used his distortion to stabilize them, and eventually they were on the top deck of the Akula superstructure. The submarine was over a hundred feet in length and, once inside, loud enough that conversations had to be done at a half shout.
“Not as fancy as the American subs,” Golgoras said, as they walked single file to the conference room. “But more reliable. Nothing breaks down, and everything is easy to fix.”
The Akula was a legendary submarine. Once the flagship of Russia’s modern nuclear-powered fleet, it had caused shock waves throughout NATO when it first slipped moorage, due to the advanced design and armament. Even now, despite its age, the craft slid through the water like a predatory fish, a sleek, fast weapon enhanced by spell work so that it actually coasted in a small tunnel of distortion, undeniably stealthy.
It did not take them long to reach the ruins of Gangaridai, but the journey was tense, too many high-powered djinns in an enclosed shape, the peculiarities of the Ghul crew adding to the bubbling broth of irritation and disquiet. Their plan was simple: ram the submarine into the ruins, trusting that it could take whatever damage Bahamut’s wards could dish out. There was no calling ahead with Bahamut. Without Barabas, they were not certain of their welcome either.
This time around, the colossal squid did not come out. The Akula was possibly too big to tangle with. In fact there was nothing here, the ocean lifeless, eerie and still, as if they were gliding through primordial waters, and inside the sub, their instrumentation started to malfunction in peculiar ways, as if the latent distortion from Matteras’s device had subverted the rules of physics, and they could hardly gauge how fast they were going or in which direction.
And then they were stopped cold.
It was instantaneous, frictionless—an arrest so compelling that they were frozen in step inside the sub itself, and even Matteras staggered, dropping to one knee. Eyes blinked open like stars all around the Akula, staring at them in countless number, the weight of their power drilling into the sub. Bahamut was much bigger now. He had co-opted every single living thing in the bay, it seemed like.
“Now we know where all the fish went,” Givaras said with some amusement.
“Intruders!” Bahamut’s voice came in a susurration all around them, the rasping of a hundred thousand gills. “Die!”
Pressure alarms began to go off around the Akula as the Marid squeezed. Distortion fields went up in the cabin, throwing up sparks as each of the djinn instinctively shielded up, still moving in slow motion, every step an active fight against Bahamut’s stasis field. They all started yelling, unsure whether Bahamut could even hear them inside, as the metal skin of the Akula actually began to groan. Blaring alarms clanged heedlessly throughout the vessel, most worryingly from the reactor chamber, as the OK-650 began to indicate its extreme unhappiness.
“She’s going to blow!” Memmion shouted finally. “Turtle up, everyone!”
“What turtle up? What the fuck?” Rais asked.
“The failsafes don’t include being squeezed together by a million fucking fish!” Memmion said.
“Bahamut! It’s me!” Rais shouted. “Please stop!”
“Hume? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me!”
“Why are you attacking me?”
“We aren’t attacking, Bahamut. We’ve come to talk! Remember, I came with Barabas before? You sent us on a mission?”
“You cracked the pillar of Gangaridai,” Bahamut said. “I remember.”
“Yes, sorry, can you please, please stop squeezing? We have a nuclear reactor in here, and it’s minutes away from blowing up.”
The pressure lessened somewhat, and there was blessed silence. Rais started to breathe again.
“Where is Barabas, Hume? I cannot sense him.”
“He’s, er, busy,” Rais said. “We’ve been trying to negotiate with Matteras. You know, stopping the earthquake device?”
“The device has been disturbing me,” Bahamut said. “I do not like visitors, Hume. Why have you brought so many djinn here?”
“Bahamut, it’s me,” Memmion said. “Your old friend.”
“I have no friends.”
“Ah… it is I, Memmion. We were allies. Once we fought together, against the old enemy.”
“Memmion,” Bahamut said. “You have forsaken me. Why have you come to disturb me now? This ship is a weapon. Weapons are forbidden in the ruins. Why have you brought it here?”
“Weapons forbidden except for his,” Rais said softly.
“Look, Bahamut, we’ve got to talk,” Memmion said.
“Who have you brought with you?” Bahamut asked. “You are not welcome here. Who is that with you? Is that Givaras the Broken I see? Is he still alive?”
“Yes,” Memmion said.
“Too bad. I do not like him.”
“And Davala, Kuriken, Elkran, Beltrex, and Golgoras are here,” Memmion said. “Oh, and Matteras, of course.”
“He has come to gloat?” Bahamut roared. “Hume, I will set off the fractal bomb. I knew I should have done it earlier. You have wasted my time. We shall see now whose device is greater.”
“No, no, Grand Marid, he has not come to gloat,” Rais said. “We have come to parley. He has turned off his device. I have negotiated a truce with him and all these elder djinn. I thought you were all on the same side?”
“We fought a war together once,” Bahamut said. “It was probably a mistake. I would not do it again. I think I chose the wrong side.”
“Bahamut, stop this nonsense,” Givaras said. “We elders have gathered together at last. We have serious business to attend to.”
“Your business is normally disastrous for everyone else. So Matteras is here,” Bahamut said. “I take it you have learned the truth of the Great War, Matteras? It is a sordid little tale.”
“I’ve learned nothing,” Matteras said. “Other than some unlikely fable about the founders of Gangaridai and their precious High King.”
“When they left, I sealed the way back. The seal is weakening,” Bahamut said. “And your device has accelerated its demise.”
“I have halted the device,” Matteras said. “I want proof, Bahamut.”
“Show him the road, Bahamut,” Givaras said. “Let’s open it. I think it’s time to see what’s on the other side.”
“Open it? No, that would be foolish, Broken,” Bahamut said. “We must renew the seal. We cannot face what is on the other side.”
“It has been twenty thousand years, Bahamut,” Memmion said. “We are tired. How long must we contend with this? So many of us are gone, and the burden on the ones who remain grows heavier. Let us end it once and for all.”
“Time has not passed on the other side,” Bahamut said. “They are as strong as ever. Only we have gotten older.”
“That’s the point, you fucking brainless fish,” Mother Davala said. “We’ve got Matteras now. The pilot ain’t weak either. We’ve got numbers again, and these younger djinn are strong as hell. We’ve got modern armaments. Let’s bust that road open and lay siege to the First City one more time.”
“Ever bellicose Davala,” Bahamut said. “Barkan, do you support this course?”
“It is our war,” Beltrex said. “I suppose we have to face that at some point.”
“Elkran?”
“I always wanted to fight. I wanted to answer Kuriken the first time. You all held me back, made a coward of me. We should end this, Bahamut.”
“It will be us who will be ended,” Bahamut said. “I too am tired. If we few true djinn are the only ones left, well, I will defer to public opinion. Let the record show that I advised against this course.”
“Don’t be so defeatist. Last time we fought with swords and spears,” Memmion said with a rumble. “This time we’re going to open the gate and ram an eight-thousand-ton nuclear submarine down his throat. Let’s see the fucker Kartiryan dodge that.”
“Matteras? Do you support this course?” Bahamut asked.
“I care nothing for your so-called war,” Matteras said. “So far I’ve only heard words. If there is some secret city, I will see it. If there is something on the other side, I will kill it. Givaras the Broken could not stand against me, nor could Kuriken. You are all old and feeble, afraid of your own shadows. Let us put this myth to bed.”
“Prepare yourselves then,” Bahamut said. “And we will attempt to open the Charnel Road.”
Later, assembled before the pillar of Gangaridai, they prepared their torpedoes and armed themselves for war, the djinns wielding their old weapons, each one invested with so many spells that it glowed with ripples of distortion. Bahamut stood beside the Akula, his myriad bodies swimming in complicated patterns. Rais could see the seal with his glasses, layers and layers of constructs, impossibly dense, covering the entirety of the ancient monolith.
“You should see the Sphinx,” Davala said, unimpressed.
“Before we proceed, have you given thought to what awaits us on the other side?” Bahamut asked.
“If anything twitches, we liquefy it,” Givaras said. “Memmion, what human armaments does this craft possess?”
“We are currently armed with twelve nuclear warheads on S-10 Granat ballistic missiles, capable of hitting targets three thousand kilometers away,” Memmion said. “In addition to a full complement of conventional torpedoes.”
“And what is the efficacy of these twelve warheads?” Givaras asked.
“I believe it is enough to atomize Gangaridai once and for all,” Memmion said. “Regardless of Kartiryan’s power.”
“Got to give it to humans, they’ve come a long way from bows and arrows,” Beltrex said admiringly.
