Djinn City, page 7
Indelbed woke up in pitch-blackness. It was not the shadowy darkness of night, but an actual, absolute absence of light. His head ached fiercely, and pain lanced up and down his spine as well as in all his extremities. It hurt to breathe. Bruises in his back throbbed fiercely. Something sharp pounded in the base of his neck.
Indelbed was no stranger to physical pain, but he realized now that all his previous experiences had been childish. This was serious adult pain. It occurred to him that he had been dropped into some pit by the djinn and left for dead. He moved his fingers and toes, instinctively testing for paralysis. He tried to raise his head, but all sorts of alarms went off.
He dozed off again and woke thirsty, nauseated, and still in approximately the same amount of discomfort. This time he rolled over onto his hands and knees. The headache, at least, had subsided to a gray wash of dull background static. He was on rough clayey ground. Everything was wet and clammy. He found his bag next to him and hugged it tightly. The soft leather was extremely comforting. He unzipped it and found the cell phone. There were no bars of service, but at least it switched on.
The dull glow of the screen revealed a dismal sight. He was somewhere deep underground, at the bottom of a well, it seemed. A dull dark cylinder of air rose above him. Matteras must have thrown him down the shaft. There was not even a sliver of light above. The walls were stone or possibly concrete. Indelbed knew nothing about wells, but he had never heard of stone being used for anything in Bangladesh.
He felt slightly disappointed. Death by djinn should have been entirely more spectacular than this. He looked and decided that this was not, in fact, a well, at least not a functioning one. First of all, there was no water. The ground was slimy, but more from some kind of underground moss. Second, as he swiveled the phone around, he found a four-foot-high vaguely roundish passage gouged into the wall, sloping down. It was narrow and Indelbed had to get on his hands and knees to fit comfortably.
The tunnel went on for some time, sloping down, perhaps switching back even; it was impossible to tell because the cell phone light faded after a few feet. The air smelled funny. There were no sounds, but he did not for a second doubt that there was something unpleasant awaiting him.
After some dithering, Indelbed decided to continue on. The crawling was slow and quickly became painful. In addition to the aches and pains, the wheels of the bag kept clipping his toes. He started shivering. Hunger and exhaustion threatened to drop him. He wished he’d put on the sweater. He thought of Rais and tears welled up.
The minutes dragged into hours, and he became a mechanical beast, following the downward curve. He could no longer tell directions. His mind had long ago shut down; he felt no fear, no panic, nothing other than the marathon runner’s simple compulsion to keep stepping on. The claustrophobia no longer bothered him, nor the darkness. He had turned off the phone long ago. It was a trance state of putting one hand in front of the other, of crawling on. Stopping meant dying, quite literally, since he assumed that if he lay down he probably wouldn’t get up again.
Eventually, he fell again, this time down a steep curve. It was a series of small falls from ledge to ledge, rather than any kind of slide. It took him down much deeper underground. His body flopped around, bruising like discarded fruit, but nothing fatal happened. Jacked up on adrenaline, he got to his feet after the last bounce with something approaching a grin. By the light of the indestructible Nokia, he saw he was in a low cavern.
It wasn’t very large because he could almost see the entirety of it, but it was considerably roomier than the well shaft he had first woken up in. There was a pool of black water ten feet from him, still and profoundly deep. The raging thirst welled up in him and he dove at the water, dunking his head, drinking long draughts. The water was clean and cold. He imagined that this is what the water bottlers had in mind, when they advertised deep spring mineral water.
The adrenaline had given him a second wind. He walked around the pool and saw numerous tunnel offshoots at different heights. These shapes were clearly not human-made and filled him with dread. He could not imagine what manner of creature lived here. He could hear nothing, but the silence struck him as ominous.
He was halfway around the pool when he noticed that one of the tunnels was glowing with some kind of light. He blinked several times and turned off the cell phone. It was very faint. He could not be sure. Shadows seemed to be moving against the wall, dark on dark. He stood still for a long moment, willing the light to sharpen. Then there was a flicker, and he felt like cheering. Light. Perhaps someone was there.
He moved toward it, unheeding. He managed only two steps before his ankle turned on something round and he collapsed facefirst. His nose hit something hard. Instinctively he turned on his cell phone and screamed. He was face-to-face with a skull: roughly humanoid, with elongated eyeholes stretched at the top and a grinning, leering mouth darkly empty, where scraps of flesh still hung like ragged curtains. There was something birdlike here, a crested ridge along the top of the head like a bone Mohawk, and Indelbed was so close he could see the little circular teeth marks all along the ceramic blue, the crosshatched scoring of calcium on calcium, where some grinding circle-mouthed predator had repeatedly raked the surface for flesh.
He swiveled his head and saw that the rest of the skeleton was all around him, far too many bones for one person. There was something akin to an arm, finger bones stretched elegantly on the floor, the index finger pointing at him with mild accusation. Another part of the body curled around, and it was an impossibly long spine, the rib cage tapering into a series of smaller, fitted bones, leaving a snake’s tail coiling around the dark, bits of cartilage still stuck in the hinges. It was an obscene creature melded from disparate animals.
It was too much. Something in his body switched off. He grew lightheaded, either from fright or exhaustion, and sank to the floor. He closed his eyes to try to still his heart. Within seconds he was fast asleep.
He was woken up by a cripple. The first things he saw were two stumpy legs ending at the knee bone, bound by dirty rags. It did not faze him. There had been a beggar of similar proportions who had occupied the drain outside their gate in Wari. Indelbed had often given him food and scraps of clothing. The man had been remarkably philosophical. His legs had been broken by choice, as a sort of professional investiture. He had once confessed to Indelbed that he actually earned quite a bit of money and even had a retirement fund in the bank.
“Ah, you’re awake,” the cripple said.
“Water,” Indelbed said. His mouth was almost gummed shut. “Light.” This was more of an observation. There was a small light hovering near the cripple’s head, an amorphous blob of dirty yellow that floated above his hunched shoulder like a particularly seedy angel.
The cripple poured water into Indelbed’s mouth. The cup was a piece of hollowed-out bone, heavy and irregular. Indelbed saw that they were in a kind of circular nest that would have been cozy under different circumstances. The cripple must have dragged him from the main chamber. He wondered briefly whether he was about to be eaten. There were tools here, of bone and rock, which spoke of some long period of domestic effort.
“Water is plentiful,” the cripple said, proving somewhat omniscient. “Food, on the other hand, is a bit more problematic. Not to worry, boy, I still have a bit left over from dinner. We will hunt when you are recovered.”
“What are you?” Indelbed asked.
“I am the Ifrit Givaras.” The legless djinn tried to draw himself up. “Philanthropist, historian, anthropologist, biologist, at your service.”
“Are you thinking of eating me?” Indelbed thought it best to get this out of the way.
The djinn pretended to examine him minutely. Up close, Indelbed saw that he had a gaunt, mostly human face, marred only by two stubby horns sprouting from the top of his head, nothing sharp or threatening, just two studs worn with age into a deep rich color.
“Hmm, not much to you, is there?” Givaras said. “I suppose I will have to pass. You won’t taste very good, I can tell. Stringy.”
“Where are we?” Indelbed asked. He had a list of questions he wanted answered and was determined to waste no time. Givaras looked like a nice guy, but his experience with adults had shown him that they were mercurial and prone to getting irritated when pressed for vital information.
“We are in a murder pit, dear boy,” Givaras said. “Somewhere underground in Sylhet, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Murder pit?”
“We djinn are very civilized,” Givaras said. “We don’t like to kill each other in public. Massive loss of auctoritas and all that. Goes against the Lore, the Mos Maiorum, as the Romans coined it. They were great copiers, the Romans. This murder pit is our little game.”
“So someone put you in here?”
“Matteras,” Givaras said. “An ingenious pit, this one. I will congratulate him on it, if I ever get the chance. Yes, Matteras. He and I had a difference of opinion. I should be flattered, really, that he bothered, given the vast height of auctoritas separating us…”
“Well, did he put me in here?”
“He must have,” Givaras said. “This is, after all, his murder pit.”
“Why?”
“We will try to figure that out presently.”
“What was the snake thing outside?”
“Ah, the skeleton that so frightened you. That was the noted Ifrit historian Risal,” Givaras said. “You screamed, you know. I came to you as fast as I could.” He pointed at his stumps. “That scream saved your life.”
“The head looked eaten,” Indelbed said. “I saw little tooth marks.”
“Rock wyrms,” Givaras said. He looked glum. “Beauty of this murder pit, really. The rock wyrm is the larva of the earth serpent, or earth dragon, as they are sometimes known. Of course the dragons are so rare that they are almost mythical. The rock larvae are rare in themselves. They are the ones who have dug these tunnels in the rock. They are omnivorous—they eat each other at the drop of a hat. They are attracted to our distortion fields. Stronger the field, greater the attraction. Cunning plan, eh? The stronger the Ifrit Matteras stuffs in here, the quicker the rock wyrms will swarm.”
“These wyrms ate your friend?” Indelbed asked. “But why was she like a snake?”
“She was trying to change,” Givaras said. “We can do that, you know, although shifting shape takes a long time and a lot of effort. She was very powerful. I warned her, but she thought she could withstand the wyrms long enough to shift form. Was trying for a wyrm shape herself. In the end she only got halfway there. As I said, the rock wyrms eat distortion fields.”
“Why are you still alive then?” Indelbed asked suspiciously.
“I am exceptionally weak for an Ifrit,” Givaras said. “I couldn’t even begin to shift into a rock wyrm, even if I wanted to. The best I could do were these horns. They are useful too; I can sense the vibrations in the ground with them.” He pointed at the smudge of light hovering over his shoulder. “This is my real discovery, however. The light, see? The wyrms hate it. They have eyes that are not fully functional yet. This wavelength of light really burns them. This is why your arrival is so fortuitous, actually.”
“What do you mean?” Indelbed had visions of Givaras trying to make a lamp out of him. The djinn did not look particularly threatening, but then, he didn’t look particularly sane either. If it weren’t for the dead snake thing outside, Indelbed wouldn’t have found any of this story credible.
“Survival is not really a one-man job here.” Givaras pointed at his legs. “The light has to be on all the time. Every time I fall asleep, the rock wyrms keep coming. I’ve lost both my legs to that…”
“They ate your legs?”
“It is rather tedious,” the djinn said. “It hurt a lot, and I was ever so weak afterward. I can probably grow them back, but I’m afraid that much distortion will call down a whole swarm of them.”
“I’m not a djinn,” Indelbed blurted out.
“Hmm?” Givaras looked puzzled. “You’re wrong, you know. Matteras wouldn’t make a mistake like this. No use throwing humans into a murder pit. Why bother? Mos Maiorum doesn’t forbid killing humans.”
“They said my mother was a djinn,” Indelbed said. “I never met her. She died giving birth. But I’ve always been human.” He said this last part to clarify any doubts this Ifrit might have. He didn’t seem to be the sharpest of djinns, despite his ingenious get-your-legs-bitten-off survival strategy. “I didn’t even believe in djinns till now.”
“You’re not fully human, you know, whatever you are. The air in here, not really suitable for your sort. You should be dead by now. Asphyxiation,” Givaras said. “Rather odd that Matteras stuffed you in here. A bit insulting to me, really.”
“They said my father was an emissary.”
Givaras tapped his head significantly. “Ah, politics then. Who was your father?”
“Kaikobad.”
“I don’t recall. What family is it?”
“Khan Rahmans,” Indelbed said. “We’re not the rich ones, however.” He always liked to clarify that at the onset, to avoid disappointing people.
“And your mother?”
“I don’t know her name. Father forbade any mention of her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I just found out she was a djinn two days ago.”
“I see.”
“I don’t see,” Indelbed said. “They said this djinn called a minor hunt on me. And then this emissary friend of my father’s came to help me, except he took me right to a place where the bad djinn was waiting. The bad djinn tried to eat me and I woke up in here.”
“Hmm, there are clues in your story, you know,” Givaras said. “Now I’ve been locked up here for a long time, so I’m not up to date with the exact politics. But I can deduce. The minor hunt is the first big clue. You see, djinn family units are not nuclear, like you humans. We are tied more along clan lines, or lines of patronage. Parents, siblings, et cetera, do not have any excessive feelings for one another. The minor hunt—a sort of culling of the younger members of a clan—was originally a practice used to remove the misshapen or aberrant djinn from the bloodlines. Djinn are long lived, you see, and even the hideously deformed ones can survive to pollute the gene pool.
“Since you’re a half-breed,” Givaras said, “your status is undecided. Whoever called the minor hunt on you was effectively making a statement about you—was in fact according you djinn status. It is possible they were trying to help you…”
“By calling on adult djinns to kill me?”
“It’s political. There have long been two lines of thought among the djinn. An argument of creationism versus evolution is one way to look at it. The exact nature of human-djinn offspring has long been a point of contention,” Givaras said. “I believe things are coming to a nodal point—a cycle of rapid change, if you will. We djinn have seen that societies tend to undergo rapid, exponential change in certain cycles. I myself have long wondered why Matteras dropped me in this splendid murder pit. His choice of other victims has confirmed certain suspicions. Your own arrival leads me to a theory that I will share with you—”
“Wait a minute,” Indelbed said. An awful thought had occurred to him. “How many others have been dropped here?”
“Not counting ourselves, there have been three victims,” Givaras said. “I shall take you to study their remains when you are better. I have saved their bones for a rainy day.”
“And they were all eaten by the wyrms?” He was still a bit scared that Givaras was a cannibal.
“Yes, they did not adopt the light trick,” Givaras said.
“How long have you been here, exactly?”
“Well, seventy years at least, by my count.” Givaras smiled. “I lost a bit of time in the middle, when I went mad. It was the endless chattering, you see. I’m so glad you’re here…”
CHAPTER 10
Mastery of Light
“The mastery of light is the only pertinent lesson in life,” Givaras said.
Indelbed had woken in the same nest, with the djinn hovering around him. He was shivering. The djinn seemed to be impervious to the chill leaching through the stones. Indelbed put on his sweater and changed his socks. He felt the urge to brush his teeth, then realized that he would most probably never have to do it again. The thought was not as cheering as he would have liked.
“Breakfast?” Givaras asked.
Indelbed was starving. He would have fallen on a bed of broccoli and torn it apart with his teeth. He would have slurped up fish head curry and eaten the fish heads too. But the wyrm larva meat Givaras offered him was on a whole other level of disgusting. The carapace was hard and segmented, with crazy patterns made by the constant scoring of rock on chitin. Givaras had used a sharp stone chisel to break into the joints of each segment to get into the soft flesh inside. This had the putrid smell of a carnivore’s back teeth; it was a grayish mass of vein-encrusted meat that the djinn ate raw, chewing methodically through every bite.
“It’s actually very good stuff. Lots of protein, lots of vitamins,” Givaras said. “And god knows what other benefits we might accrue. You must remember that these are the larvae of creatures that might well become some kind of dragon in the far future.”
Indelbed sat dully staring at the djinn. A segment of carapace sat on his lap, upturned like a plate, the meat quivering like a small hill of Jell-O. He had once had Jell-O at a family gathering; it had been marvelous. Later, he and Butloo had tried to re-create the Jell-O from a packet, but they had managed only a watery mess. Possibly their oft-repaired fridge was not capable of freezing it properly.
Givaras took some pity on him. “Look, what if I cooked it a bit, eh?”
He clamped his hand on the larva plate. Indelbed choked back a scream as the plate suddenly got too hot to hold. The djinn’s hand glowed red, as if a flashlight were pressing into his palm, and for a second Indelbed could see the distortion field at work, and this brought home the insanity of his situation more than anything.
Indelbed was no stranger to physical pain, but he realized now that all his previous experiences had been childish. This was serious adult pain. It occurred to him that he had been dropped into some pit by the djinn and left for dead. He moved his fingers and toes, instinctively testing for paralysis. He tried to raise his head, but all sorts of alarms went off.
He dozed off again and woke thirsty, nauseated, and still in approximately the same amount of discomfort. This time he rolled over onto his hands and knees. The headache, at least, had subsided to a gray wash of dull background static. He was on rough clayey ground. Everything was wet and clammy. He found his bag next to him and hugged it tightly. The soft leather was extremely comforting. He unzipped it and found the cell phone. There were no bars of service, but at least it switched on.
The dull glow of the screen revealed a dismal sight. He was somewhere deep underground, at the bottom of a well, it seemed. A dull dark cylinder of air rose above him. Matteras must have thrown him down the shaft. There was not even a sliver of light above. The walls were stone or possibly concrete. Indelbed knew nothing about wells, but he had never heard of stone being used for anything in Bangladesh.
He felt slightly disappointed. Death by djinn should have been entirely more spectacular than this. He looked and decided that this was not, in fact, a well, at least not a functioning one. First of all, there was no water. The ground was slimy, but more from some kind of underground moss. Second, as he swiveled the phone around, he found a four-foot-high vaguely roundish passage gouged into the wall, sloping down. It was narrow and Indelbed had to get on his hands and knees to fit comfortably.
The tunnel went on for some time, sloping down, perhaps switching back even; it was impossible to tell because the cell phone light faded after a few feet. The air smelled funny. There were no sounds, but he did not for a second doubt that there was something unpleasant awaiting him.
After some dithering, Indelbed decided to continue on. The crawling was slow and quickly became painful. In addition to the aches and pains, the wheels of the bag kept clipping his toes. He started shivering. Hunger and exhaustion threatened to drop him. He wished he’d put on the sweater. He thought of Rais and tears welled up.
The minutes dragged into hours, and he became a mechanical beast, following the downward curve. He could no longer tell directions. His mind had long ago shut down; he felt no fear, no panic, nothing other than the marathon runner’s simple compulsion to keep stepping on. The claustrophobia no longer bothered him, nor the darkness. He had turned off the phone long ago. It was a trance state of putting one hand in front of the other, of crawling on. Stopping meant dying, quite literally, since he assumed that if he lay down he probably wouldn’t get up again.
Eventually, he fell again, this time down a steep curve. It was a series of small falls from ledge to ledge, rather than any kind of slide. It took him down much deeper underground. His body flopped around, bruising like discarded fruit, but nothing fatal happened. Jacked up on adrenaline, he got to his feet after the last bounce with something approaching a grin. By the light of the indestructible Nokia, he saw he was in a low cavern.
It wasn’t very large because he could almost see the entirety of it, but it was considerably roomier than the well shaft he had first woken up in. There was a pool of black water ten feet from him, still and profoundly deep. The raging thirst welled up in him and he dove at the water, dunking his head, drinking long draughts. The water was clean and cold. He imagined that this is what the water bottlers had in mind, when they advertised deep spring mineral water.
The adrenaline had given him a second wind. He walked around the pool and saw numerous tunnel offshoots at different heights. These shapes were clearly not human-made and filled him with dread. He could not imagine what manner of creature lived here. He could hear nothing, but the silence struck him as ominous.
He was halfway around the pool when he noticed that one of the tunnels was glowing with some kind of light. He blinked several times and turned off the cell phone. It was very faint. He could not be sure. Shadows seemed to be moving against the wall, dark on dark. He stood still for a long moment, willing the light to sharpen. Then there was a flicker, and he felt like cheering. Light. Perhaps someone was there.
He moved toward it, unheeding. He managed only two steps before his ankle turned on something round and he collapsed facefirst. His nose hit something hard. Instinctively he turned on his cell phone and screamed. He was face-to-face with a skull: roughly humanoid, with elongated eyeholes stretched at the top and a grinning, leering mouth darkly empty, where scraps of flesh still hung like ragged curtains. There was something birdlike here, a crested ridge along the top of the head like a bone Mohawk, and Indelbed was so close he could see the little circular teeth marks all along the ceramic blue, the crosshatched scoring of calcium on calcium, where some grinding circle-mouthed predator had repeatedly raked the surface for flesh.
He swiveled his head and saw that the rest of the skeleton was all around him, far too many bones for one person. There was something akin to an arm, finger bones stretched elegantly on the floor, the index finger pointing at him with mild accusation. Another part of the body curled around, and it was an impossibly long spine, the rib cage tapering into a series of smaller, fitted bones, leaving a snake’s tail coiling around the dark, bits of cartilage still stuck in the hinges. It was an obscene creature melded from disparate animals.
It was too much. Something in his body switched off. He grew lightheaded, either from fright or exhaustion, and sank to the floor. He closed his eyes to try to still his heart. Within seconds he was fast asleep.
He was woken up by a cripple. The first things he saw were two stumpy legs ending at the knee bone, bound by dirty rags. It did not faze him. There had been a beggar of similar proportions who had occupied the drain outside their gate in Wari. Indelbed had often given him food and scraps of clothing. The man had been remarkably philosophical. His legs had been broken by choice, as a sort of professional investiture. He had once confessed to Indelbed that he actually earned quite a bit of money and even had a retirement fund in the bank.
“Ah, you’re awake,” the cripple said.
“Water,” Indelbed said. His mouth was almost gummed shut. “Light.” This was more of an observation. There was a small light hovering near the cripple’s head, an amorphous blob of dirty yellow that floated above his hunched shoulder like a particularly seedy angel.
The cripple poured water into Indelbed’s mouth. The cup was a piece of hollowed-out bone, heavy and irregular. Indelbed saw that they were in a kind of circular nest that would have been cozy under different circumstances. The cripple must have dragged him from the main chamber. He wondered briefly whether he was about to be eaten. There were tools here, of bone and rock, which spoke of some long period of domestic effort.
“Water is plentiful,” the cripple said, proving somewhat omniscient. “Food, on the other hand, is a bit more problematic. Not to worry, boy, I still have a bit left over from dinner. We will hunt when you are recovered.”
“What are you?” Indelbed asked.
“I am the Ifrit Givaras.” The legless djinn tried to draw himself up. “Philanthropist, historian, anthropologist, biologist, at your service.”
“Are you thinking of eating me?” Indelbed thought it best to get this out of the way.
The djinn pretended to examine him minutely. Up close, Indelbed saw that he had a gaunt, mostly human face, marred only by two stubby horns sprouting from the top of his head, nothing sharp or threatening, just two studs worn with age into a deep rich color.
“Hmm, not much to you, is there?” Givaras said. “I suppose I will have to pass. You won’t taste very good, I can tell. Stringy.”
“Where are we?” Indelbed asked. He had a list of questions he wanted answered and was determined to waste no time. Givaras looked like a nice guy, but his experience with adults had shown him that they were mercurial and prone to getting irritated when pressed for vital information.
“We are in a murder pit, dear boy,” Givaras said. “Somewhere underground in Sylhet, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Murder pit?”
“We djinn are very civilized,” Givaras said. “We don’t like to kill each other in public. Massive loss of auctoritas and all that. Goes against the Lore, the Mos Maiorum, as the Romans coined it. They were great copiers, the Romans. This murder pit is our little game.”
“So someone put you in here?”
“Matteras,” Givaras said. “An ingenious pit, this one. I will congratulate him on it, if I ever get the chance. Yes, Matteras. He and I had a difference of opinion. I should be flattered, really, that he bothered, given the vast height of auctoritas separating us…”
“Well, did he put me in here?”
“He must have,” Givaras said. “This is, after all, his murder pit.”
“Why?”
“We will try to figure that out presently.”
“What was the snake thing outside?”
“Ah, the skeleton that so frightened you. That was the noted Ifrit historian Risal,” Givaras said. “You screamed, you know. I came to you as fast as I could.” He pointed at his stumps. “That scream saved your life.”
“The head looked eaten,” Indelbed said. “I saw little tooth marks.”
“Rock wyrms,” Givaras said. He looked glum. “Beauty of this murder pit, really. The rock wyrm is the larva of the earth serpent, or earth dragon, as they are sometimes known. Of course the dragons are so rare that they are almost mythical. The rock larvae are rare in themselves. They are the ones who have dug these tunnels in the rock. They are omnivorous—they eat each other at the drop of a hat. They are attracted to our distortion fields. Stronger the field, greater the attraction. Cunning plan, eh? The stronger the Ifrit Matteras stuffs in here, the quicker the rock wyrms will swarm.”
“These wyrms ate your friend?” Indelbed asked. “But why was she like a snake?”
“She was trying to change,” Givaras said. “We can do that, you know, although shifting shape takes a long time and a lot of effort. She was very powerful. I warned her, but she thought she could withstand the wyrms long enough to shift form. Was trying for a wyrm shape herself. In the end she only got halfway there. As I said, the rock wyrms eat distortion fields.”
“Why are you still alive then?” Indelbed asked suspiciously.
“I am exceptionally weak for an Ifrit,” Givaras said. “I couldn’t even begin to shift into a rock wyrm, even if I wanted to. The best I could do were these horns. They are useful too; I can sense the vibrations in the ground with them.” He pointed at the smudge of light hovering over his shoulder. “This is my real discovery, however. The light, see? The wyrms hate it. They have eyes that are not fully functional yet. This wavelength of light really burns them. This is why your arrival is so fortuitous, actually.”
“What do you mean?” Indelbed had visions of Givaras trying to make a lamp out of him. The djinn did not look particularly threatening, but then, he didn’t look particularly sane either. If it weren’t for the dead snake thing outside, Indelbed wouldn’t have found any of this story credible.
“Survival is not really a one-man job here.” Givaras pointed at his legs. “The light has to be on all the time. Every time I fall asleep, the rock wyrms keep coming. I’ve lost both my legs to that…”
“They ate your legs?”
“It is rather tedious,” the djinn said. “It hurt a lot, and I was ever so weak afterward. I can probably grow them back, but I’m afraid that much distortion will call down a whole swarm of them.”
“I’m not a djinn,” Indelbed blurted out.
“Hmm?” Givaras looked puzzled. “You’re wrong, you know. Matteras wouldn’t make a mistake like this. No use throwing humans into a murder pit. Why bother? Mos Maiorum doesn’t forbid killing humans.”
“They said my mother was a djinn,” Indelbed said. “I never met her. She died giving birth. But I’ve always been human.” He said this last part to clarify any doubts this Ifrit might have. He didn’t seem to be the sharpest of djinns, despite his ingenious get-your-legs-bitten-off survival strategy. “I didn’t even believe in djinns till now.”
“You’re not fully human, you know, whatever you are. The air in here, not really suitable for your sort. You should be dead by now. Asphyxiation,” Givaras said. “Rather odd that Matteras stuffed you in here. A bit insulting to me, really.”
“They said my father was an emissary.”
Givaras tapped his head significantly. “Ah, politics then. Who was your father?”
“Kaikobad.”
“I don’t recall. What family is it?”
“Khan Rahmans,” Indelbed said. “We’re not the rich ones, however.” He always liked to clarify that at the onset, to avoid disappointing people.
“And your mother?”
“I don’t know her name. Father forbade any mention of her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I just found out she was a djinn two days ago.”
“I see.”
“I don’t see,” Indelbed said. “They said this djinn called a minor hunt on me. And then this emissary friend of my father’s came to help me, except he took me right to a place where the bad djinn was waiting. The bad djinn tried to eat me and I woke up in here.”
“Hmm, there are clues in your story, you know,” Givaras said. “Now I’ve been locked up here for a long time, so I’m not up to date with the exact politics. But I can deduce. The minor hunt is the first big clue. You see, djinn family units are not nuclear, like you humans. We are tied more along clan lines, or lines of patronage. Parents, siblings, et cetera, do not have any excessive feelings for one another. The minor hunt—a sort of culling of the younger members of a clan—was originally a practice used to remove the misshapen or aberrant djinn from the bloodlines. Djinn are long lived, you see, and even the hideously deformed ones can survive to pollute the gene pool.
“Since you’re a half-breed,” Givaras said, “your status is undecided. Whoever called the minor hunt on you was effectively making a statement about you—was in fact according you djinn status. It is possible they were trying to help you…”
“By calling on adult djinns to kill me?”
“It’s political. There have long been two lines of thought among the djinn. An argument of creationism versus evolution is one way to look at it. The exact nature of human-djinn offspring has long been a point of contention,” Givaras said. “I believe things are coming to a nodal point—a cycle of rapid change, if you will. We djinn have seen that societies tend to undergo rapid, exponential change in certain cycles. I myself have long wondered why Matteras dropped me in this splendid murder pit. His choice of other victims has confirmed certain suspicions. Your own arrival leads me to a theory that I will share with you—”
“Wait a minute,” Indelbed said. An awful thought had occurred to him. “How many others have been dropped here?”
“Not counting ourselves, there have been three victims,” Givaras said. “I shall take you to study their remains when you are better. I have saved their bones for a rainy day.”
“And they were all eaten by the wyrms?” He was still a bit scared that Givaras was a cannibal.
“Yes, they did not adopt the light trick,” Givaras said.
“How long have you been here, exactly?”
“Well, seventy years at least, by my count.” Givaras smiled. “I lost a bit of time in the middle, when I went mad. It was the endless chattering, you see. I’m so glad you’re here…”
CHAPTER 10
Mastery of Light
“The mastery of light is the only pertinent lesson in life,” Givaras said.
Indelbed had woken in the same nest, with the djinn hovering around him. He was shivering. The djinn seemed to be impervious to the chill leaching through the stones. Indelbed put on his sweater and changed his socks. He felt the urge to brush his teeth, then realized that he would most probably never have to do it again. The thought was not as cheering as he would have liked.
“Breakfast?” Givaras asked.
Indelbed was starving. He would have fallen on a bed of broccoli and torn it apart with his teeth. He would have slurped up fish head curry and eaten the fish heads too. But the wyrm larva meat Givaras offered him was on a whole other level of disgusting. The carapace was hard and segmented, with crazy patterns made by the constant scoring of rock on chitin. Givaras had used a sharp stone chisel to break into the joints of each segment to get into the soft flesh inside. This had the putrid smell of a carnivore’s back teeth; it was a grayish mass of vein-encrusted meat that the djinn ate raw, chewing methodically through every bite.
“It’s actually very good stuff. Lots of protein, lots of vitamins,” Givaras said. “And god knows what other benefits we might accrue. You must remember that these are the larvae of creatures that might well become some kind of dragon in the far future.”
Indelbed sat dully staring at the djinn. A segment of carapace sat on his lap, upturned like a plate, the meat quivering like a small hill of Jell-O. He had once had Jell-O at a family gathering; it had been marvelous. Later, he and Butloo had tried to re-create the Jell-O from a packet, but they had managed only a watery mess. Possibly their oft-repaired fridge was not capable of freezing it properly.
Givaras took some pity on him. “Look, what if I cooked it a bit, eh?”
He clamped his hand on the larva plate. Indelbed choked back a scream as the plate suddenly got too hot to hold. The djinn’s hand glowed red, as if a flashlight were pressing into his palm, and for a second Indelbed could see the distortion field at work, and this brought home the insanity of his situation more than anything.
