It is a palace under construction, empty and quiet. Tawaddud leads us through it, to a ledge that overhangs a vertical drop that goes all the way down to the bottom of the Shard, a yawning pit lined with jinn wires.
‘How are we going to get down there?’ I ask.
Tawaddud gives me a serious look. ‘Do you trust me, Lord Sumanguru?’
Her eyes are dark and beautiful in the night. She has been through a lot. Like me, she escaped a prison and ended up back in one. She is chasing something that will always escape her. She wants to do the right thing.
The ship is right. I’m going to let her down.
Do what you do best.
So I nod slowly and smile.
‘Then give me your hand.’
She squeezes my fingers in a surprisingly strong grip. Then she steps into the abyss, pulling me along with her.
I let out a scream and try to grab hold of something, but it is too late. We plummet down into the blackness. I hear Tawaddud laughing. Suddenly, there is an amber shimmering around us, and the fall becomes a gentle descent.
‘An angelnet,’ I breathe.
Tawaddud floats next to me and waves.
‘Yes!’ she laughs. ‘Only the Ugarte Shard still has a fully functioning one. That’s where the richest gogol merchants live. But here, you have to know where to look.’
I close my eyes as we fall, carried by the ancient guardian angels of Sirr-in-the-sky, and keep them shut all the way down.
After the descent, they take the last tram to the base of the Uzeda Shard.
Tawaddud stands opposite Sumanguru, holding on to a handlebar. The city lights glint in his athar glasses, reflections dancing to the rhythm of the rails. He has chosen round, blue ones that match the colours of the mutalibun gear.
‘This broken spimescape of yours hurts my eyes,’ he says, ‘but I think we are being followed.’
Tawaddud looks past him and curses under her breath. There are three jinni following them, colourful serpents made from polygons, swirling amongst the people in the car, moving faster than a human could, riding the jinn wires above the train. Without thought-forms, they will see relatively little in the physical world – so what is needed is a disguise in the athar.
Tawaddud picks out a couple on the train, a slight woman gesturing animatedly at her partner, talking about a new jinn jar for their servant. Under her breath, she whispers the Secret Name of Al-Musawwir, the Fashioner of Forms, duplicating her own shape and that of Sumanguru in the athar, overlaying them on the couple. Then she waits, and sure enough, when the couple gets off at the next stop, two of the jinni follow them, leaving the third one lingering behind. After a few moments, it darts away too.
‘Smooth,’ Sumanguru says.
The only Sirr fragment not completely built up, the Uzeda Shard is covered in scaffoldings and plastic sheets, a sign of ongoing construction projects to repair the damage of a great wildcode infection two years ago. Tawaddud remembers the great structures that suddenly sprang into being, a wildcode thing brought from the desert by a contaminated soul train, a tree of sapphire climbing up the shard. It grew so fast you could see it, a whirlpool of wild jinni around it in the athar.
As they get closer to the dark skeleton in the horizon, her heart beats faster. Duny. Duny. I am doing the right thing. Father must know the truth. She thinks about the long nights of guilt, of the feeling that something was wrong. Maybe it was her all along. She wanted me to feel small so I would stay out of her way.
She squeezes the Sobornost mind-bullet in her pocket. It will emulate a part of your brain, the part the fragment will enter, Sumanguru said. It’s like a jinn jar, except that he can’t get out. Such a small thing, cool metal, the size of her fingertip.
She tries to think about Kafur’s calm voice, how he took her in after the City of the Dead. He is going to help. It is going to be all right. Kafur taught her that everything heals.
There are great differences in altitude here, sudden sharp drops beneath the elevated tram rails and yawning vertical alleys that go up to the Shard. She looks down at the Great Northern Station where the infection started. The long low halls and arcs still bear the marks of the battle the muhtasibs and Repentants fought to contain the infection, scarred ribs of metal and glass.
Even if it takes a while for the scars to disappear.
They get off at the last stop, squeezing past wirers and workmen returning from late shifts at the sites. Tawaddud leads them down a winding stairway into the lower levels. There are no signs of Repentants, and the athar here is so sparse and broken that it would be difficult for the jinni to track them anyway. Duny must be seething with rage somewhere.
There are glowing signs in the arches that appear as they enter the remains of the Northern Station. The rattle of trams above makes it difficult to speak. There is a smell of ozone everywhere, and the air tastes thick. An old soul train tunnel opens before them suddenly like the pupil of a giant eye.
Inside, the ground is uneven, and Tawaddud almost cuts herself on the diamond rail. In the distance, there are rumblings and mutterings. The Banu Sasan whisper that the wildcode creature was not completely defeated, that its children still live in the ruins.
‘When you mentioned palaces,’ Sumanguru says, ‘this is not exactly what I had in mind.’
‘Ssh,’ Tawaddud says. Ahead, there is a glowing sign on the wall, a simple circle, with two dots for eyes. A face. Tawaddud speaks the Name Kafur taught her, long ago, and a door opens, revealing a long corridor dimly lit with red light, echoing with distant music and whispers.
Tawaddud gives Sumanguru a white mask and puts one over her own face.
‘Welcome to the Palace of Stories.’
The Palace has changed, as it always does. It is a labyrinth of dimly lit passages that suddenly expand into rooms when you turn a corner.
There is a room with huge white walls on which shadows dance even if there is no apparent source of light, spiky-haired, long-limbed blots of ink that flee when Tawaddud tries to touch them. Another huge hall is criss-crossed by copper wires and hums with static electricity, making her feel heavy as if before a thunderstorm, her hair standing up, crackling. There is a gallery with walls of dark velvet, with thousands of candles burning in the ceiling, upside down, following the gestures of a man wearing a black suit and white gloves and a ballet dancer’s skirt, a slow dance of light and flame. The athar is thick with jinni weaving illusions.
A delicate woman with boyish dark hair, with a red mask instead of white, approaches them and gives a slight bow.
‘You look like you have never been to the Palace before,’ she tells Sumanguru. ‘How may we serve you? What is your pleasure? Bodies for jinni, stories for flesh.’ She looks the Sobornost gogol up and down, one hand on her hip, stroking her lips with a finger. ‘Lord Shoulders here could enjoy cinema, perhaps, or detective stories. As for you—’ She blinks. ‘Tawaddud?’
‘Emina.’ Tawaddud smiles beneath her mask. ‘I am here to see Kafur.’
Emina grabs her arm and pulls her through a velvet curtain, to a small bare-walled chamber.
‘You have some nerve to come here, you little bitch,’ she hisses.
‘Emina, I—’
‘When the Repentants came for you, we had to run and hide. I went to the City of the Dead. I was a ghul for a while. Do you know what that’s like? Of course not, Miss Tawaddud who came to play at being an embodiment slave, until the fun was over and it was time to go back to Daddy.’ She throws her hands into the air in disgust.
‘And who is this? A new plaything? He smells of Sobornost. We have masrurs here, you know. But why would you care about that, living in your palace now?’
‘It wasn’t like that. Please listen to me.’
Emina takes a sobbing breath. ‘Of course it was. Silly girl. Go away now. Shoo.’ She wipes her eyes and waves towards the corridor.
‘Emina, please. I need Kafur’s help. I’m looking for the Axolotl. I have sobors, I can pay—?
??
Emina looks at her sideways. ‘So. The Axolotl. Finally. Tired of the limp-dicked mutalibun lords, eh?’ She crosses her arms. ‘Tell me, is it another game of pretend, or something more?’
Tears well up in Tawaddud’s eyes.
‘It is something more,’ she whispers. She wipes her eyes on her sleeve.
Emina looks at her for a moment. Then she gives her a hug.
‘There, there, Tawa, it’s all right. You look terrible. Don’t make it worse. Aunt Emina will sort it out. I will take you to Kafur, and if that silly man does not help you, he’ll answer to me.’
She pats Tawaddud’s back. ‘The Axolotl has been here, but not for a while. They say he has been running with the masrurs, attacking soul trains, fighting Sobornost.’ She gives Sumanguru a dark look. ‘You should be careful of the company you keep.’
‘Emina, I’m . . . I’m sorry about what happened. I did not want to cause trouble for anybody. This was a good place for me. Please tell Zuweyla and Marjana and Ghanim and everybody that—’
Emina’s eyes sparkle. ‘Don’t you worry about that. You just needed a spanking, that’s all. We all want the story of the jinn prince, and if you found yours, all the better. Now come on - let’s go find Kafur.’ She frowns. ‘He has changed a bit since you last saw him.’
Kafur receives them in a cavernous space, sitting cross-legged on the floor under a railway arch – they must be somewhere below the Station. Kafur wears a familiar long-sleeved, hooded robe, but is more crooked and twisted than Tawaddud remembers. His face is hidden behind a red mask. He is flanked by the two jinn thought-forms in forbidden female shapes, one with naked flesh of glittering, silvery snake scales, the other a slender sculpture of ice.
I have been away a long time, Tawaddud thinks.
‘Come closer,’ Kafur says. His voice has changed, too: it is higher, trilling, mixed with the sound of bells, not a human voice at all. ‘I never thought I would see you again. Such a beautiful self-loop. Come closer.’
There are pillows on the ground in a semicircle before Kafur. Tawaddud kneels on one of them.
‘Master, I come asking for a boon,’ she says.
‘A boon? Tawaddud, who now lives in the world of palaces and high muhtasib lords and the mighty Sobornost, comes back to the world of stories and secrets, and the first thing she asks Kafur is a boon? Do you not have a kiss for me, for old times’ sake?’
Kafur pulls back his hood and removes his mask. ‘Even if wildcode has not been kind to me. No one escapes the Destroyer of Delights.’
His face is a bloated, fungus-like mass, purple and blue, with yawning openings in his cheeks, running with pale fluids. Tiny things move and chitter in his empty eyesockets: chimera insects with iridescent shells that dart in and out of the crevices and creep across the ruin of Kafur’s visage. He touches the black wound where his lips used to be with an embroidered sleeve. Tawaddud’s stomach turns.
‘So, what do you say? You can close your eyes if you wish.’
Sumanguru gets up, raising a fist. ‘Maybe I’ll give you a kiss,’ he growls.
Tawaddud lays a hand on his arm.
‘The Palace is his,’ she says calmly. ‘I will pay his price.’
‘I cannot accept that.’
‘I would have thought you did not care much for what the flesh does with flesh.’
‘This is different,’ Sumanguru says, staring at Kafur.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ Tawaddud says, and speaks the Secret Name of Al-Jabbar, the Irresistible.
It is possible to entwine forcibly, especially with a jinn. It is one of the forbidden things, but she is too angry to think about the consequences. She binds the serpent jinn woman’s self-loop into her own with the Name. Then she kisses Kafur as the jinn woman, tongue turning into foglets, fire and poison, sucking air out of his lungs until he is left sputtering and gasping.
When she pulls back and wipes her own lips with the back of her hand, the jinn thought-form lets out an angry scream and evaporates into thin air. The forced entwinement brings a blinding headache, but she grits her teeth.
‘You really need to work on your stamina, Kafur, if you want to trade in kisses instead of stories,’ she says.
Kafur stares at her for a moment and bursts out laughing, a shrill, crickety sound. ‘A kiss to die for, I agree!’ He replaces his mask. ‘Now, what is it that you want from old Kafur, dear Tawaddud?’
Tawaddud swallows. ‘You taught me that entwinement always leaves a trace. I want to contact a jinn, Zaybak, also known as the Axolotl, whose tomb you found me in. I want to find him in my mind. If I served you well, please help me do this thing.’
‘You did serve me well.’ Kafur’s hands move inside his long sleeves, sinuous and quick. ‘But you also brought Repentants to my house. What you ask is no small thing. You want to make what was torn asunder into one. You want me to cast a net into the athar to catch the father of body thieves and bring him to you, like a desert gogol in a jar. What will you give me in return?’
‘My father will—’
‘Ah. Your father. A wealthy man, a powerful man, with many gogols, many palaces, many friends. But here we care not for the common coin of Sirr-in-the-day. You know this: our trade is in Names and stories. Can you offer Kafur either, Tawaddud of House Gomelez, who learned all she knows from him? Can you tell me a Name I do not know? Or can you tell me a story I have not heard before, like the Aun always ask?’
She thinks about the Name the qarin told her, and it rises to her lips. But then, Sumanguru speaks.
‘How about a story from the stars?’ he says.
‘Interesting,’ Kafur says. ‘That would be a rare jewel indeed.’
Sumanguru removes his athar glasses.
‘This is a story I heard from a spaceship, but I swear it’s true,’ he says. ‘Once upon a time, there were two girls called Mieli and Sydän who went to a flying city on Venus so they could live for ever.’
20
THE STORY OF MIELI AND SYDÄN
Mieli presses her face against the invisible skin of the flying city and watches her lover dance in the sky.
The Venusian godlings are naked, chalk-skinned shapes against the sulphur acid clouds, Sydän a tiny thing next to them on her borrowed wings. Mieli watches as they swoop and chase her, force her into a spiralling dive and knows that she is laughing, wildly and loudly, having the time of her life.
‘Mieli, girl! Come on!’ she shouts in Mieli’s ear. ‘I bet you can’t catch me!’
It would only take a moment to be there with her, to let the city give her a second skin and enough strength for her wings to survive the Venerian wind, but Mieli lets Sydän have this thing to herself. Besides, she still feels heavy, earthbound, in spite of Amtor City’s utility foglets supporting her frame like a gentle ghost hand. She does not want to fly just yet. Or so she tells herself.
She feels vertigo looking at the rough basalt landscape below, with its strange fractures, furrows and tick-shaped volcanoes, thinking about the three-hundred-mile winds that roar outside, the searing heat under the angry cloud cover that makes the whole planet something akin to a vast pressure cooker. Mieli is no stranger to deadly environments, having spent most of her life in vacuum skinsuits, but the Dark Man of space is not angry at you, just empty. For Venus, it’s personal, and Mieli is not ready to meet her, not yet.
Stop moping, says Perhonen in her mind. Go out. Fly. Play. We came all this way. Let’s enjoy it. There is impatience in the ship’s voice.
‘Quiet,’ says Mieli. ‘I want to watch the dawn.’
In Amtor City, the dawn lasts for ever, the eye of the sun orange and red, painting the thick milky clouds in colours she has never seen in Oort, in the land of ice and dirty snow. The city rides the hot winds at the terminator, racing daylight: a bubble of q-stone and diamond with a city of fairy towers inside, all tall tensegrity spires and twined candyfloss. A civilisation dancing on the breath of Venus, fifty kilometres above the surface.
The viewing bubbles on the edge of the city provide a perfect view, and Mieli is content just to sit and enjoy it by herself. Being alone is a strange sensation after the journey, after all that time together under the thin skin of the spider-ship, light hours from the Kuiper belt, months surfing the Highway manifold.
But perhaps it is not enough to look at the dawn. Perhaps she should go —
‘Hey, Oort girl. Want a peach?’
The voice startles her. There is a boy on the next bench, perhaps sixteen years old, with dark skin that looks coppery in the Venerian dawn-light. He is wearing storybook clothes: jeans and a T-shirt, loose on his skinny frame. His hair is thin and grey, but his eyes are young and piercingly blue. He sits with his knees up, hands folded behind his head, leaning back. There is a backpack next to him.
‘How do you know I come from Oort?’ Mieli asks.
‘Oh, you know.’ The youth strokes his chin. ‘You have the look. Like planets are too big for you. Peach?’
He reaches into his backpack, pulls out a golden orb and throws it at her. She almost fails to catch it, unused to the quick parabolic arcs in the gravity. She blushes.
‘It is not too big,’ Mieli says. ‘Just too much gravity.’ She walks to the bench, self-conscious of her gait: she keeps feeling that she’ll fall through the floor any minute and walks carefully, as if the ground was made of thin glass. The boy moves his backpack and she sits down next to him, grateful.
‘So, why are you not out there, in the air, flying? That should make it easier.’
Mieli takes a bite of the peach. It is sweet and yielding, with a trace of bitterness, like Venerian air.
‘And you? Why are you not flying?’ she asks.
‘Well,’ says the boy. ‘You’re here, for one thing. Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, all alone in the city of the gods.’ He bites his lip. ‘Or maybe I just don’t like flying.’