I blink and sit up slowly, brushing tiny cogs from my jacket lapels. My back is on fire and warm blood trickles from the wound, but I force myself to smile.
‘If you are talking about Joséphine Pellegrini,’ I say slowly, ‘I can assure you that our relationship is merely . . . professional.’
The tiger looms over me and pushes its muzzle close to my face. Its hot breath washes over me, a mixed stench of carrion and metal.
‘Traitors like you and her belong together,’ it says.
‘I’m not sure I know what you are talking about.’
This time I can feel the growl as well as hear it: it is so deep that it echoes in my chest.
‘You broke your promise,’ the tiger roars. ‘You left me here. For a thousand years.’
I curse my past self again for his blatant disregard for his own future.
‘I admit it’s not a very attractive setting,’ I say.
‘Torture,’ the tiger whispers. ‘This was a place of torture. The same things, happening over and over again. Foxes, bears, monkeys. Tricks and plots and follies. Stories for children. Even when I killed them, they would come back. Until things started breaking down. I suppose I should thank you for that as well, le Flambeur.’ Its good eye flashes. I swallow.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘this situation really invites a philosophical debate about the nature of identity. For example, I actually lack most of the memories of the individual you are talking about. I don’t remember breaking any promises. And as a matter of fact, I am here to get you out.’
‘I made a promise, too,’ the tiger says. ‘After I waited long enough.’
I swallow.
‘And what was that?’
It backs off a few steps, circling me, tail swishing back and forth.
‘Get up,’ it hisses.
Painfully, I stumble to my feet, leaning on the stone bear.
‘Whatever the old Jean le Flambeur may have told you,’ I say, ‘the new one recognises that we have common interests. Especially regarding causing discomfort to Matjek Chen. Isn’t that the promise you made? To get revenge?’
‘No,’ the tiger says. Its words turn into a roar. ‘I promised I would give you a head start.’
I take one look at its gleaming eye, grab the Realmspace sword and start running.
Running through the forest is a nightmare. My back wound bleeds. The cog-snow sticks to the gashes in the soles of my feet. I leave a red trail behind. My breathing is a painful wheeze. The tiger is a shadow, never far: if I try to slow down, it makes a dash at me, silent and vengeful, enough to wake up my monkey fear and send me off stumbling madly across the tree roots and thickets again.
So I’m not surprised when I collapse on the edge of the opening where I started from and see the tiger, between me and the Realmgate, resting, cradling something between its front paws.
It takes a while for it to come to me, and when it does, it seems almost reluctant: soft paws on the clock snow, tiny glittering wheels in its whiskers like raindrops. Death in black and white, like a chessboard.
And for the second time, like with the Hunter thing, I feel the lines of force between us, and let them guide me towards the right move.
I step into the clearing.
‘Well, here we are,’ I say. ‘And I told you. Here is your way out. Humanity waits on the other side. What are you waiting for?’
The tiger hesitates. It looks at the gate suspiciously. In spite of all the pain, I want to smile.
Realms translate. Realms have rules. For the old, complex ones, the rules and narratives have become too intricate to understand, no one knows how they began. But the one in the Box is only a small Realm, a place of animal stories, perhaps for zoku children. And I’m betting the tiger has been here for a long time, soaking in the way things work. The fox and the bear. The monkey and the tiger.
‘I don’t think I’ll believe you, this time,’ it says. ‘Perhaps you should go first.’
My heart jumps with sudden hope. I take a step backwards, shaking my head. Don’t throw me into the thorn bush. But then the tiger lets out a depressingly human laugh. ‘Le Flambeur,’ it says. ‘Let’s stop playing. I just wanted to see you run. I’m not going to let you through the gate. I’m not going to try to go through either. You’ll have some surprise for me on the other side, no doubt. But you are right: you did give me a way out, this time.’ It moves aside, and I see what is lying on the ground.
In life, she had blue dreadlocks and pale skin that stands out even against the white snow. She looks younger than I expected, or perhaps it is the laughing eyes and the piercing in her lower lip. But when I see the black and red ruin that her body is from neck downwards I have to turn away and retch.
‘She came through first,’ the tiger says. ‘I made it quick. Not very satisfying, of course, not much meat. But there were EPR states inside her, for qupting, for connecting her to your ship. Perhonen, I believe she is called. Or was.’
I try to get up. ‘Bastard. I should have let you rot here.’
‘Thinking about you gave me the strength to keep going. You and Chen and death.’ The tiger’s grin is somewhere between human and animal. ‘But it’s your turn first. We’ll go somewhere else to have a little talk.’
The forest melts like snow. For a moment, we stand in the bone-white of the firmament, running in Perhonen’s synthbio core. Then the tiger roars its Founder code at the vir – dead children and rust and fire and blood – and rewrites the world.
Mieli does not need combat autism to blanket her rage. She rides it, blinks into the spimescape, fires her ghostgun at the ship’s walls, launches Gödel bombs into Perhonen’s systems. The weapons. The self-replicating logic of her attack software burns through the infected systems like wildfire. The butterfly thing – Sumanguru – is too fast for her: it isolates the synthbio core from her attack. But that’s not what she is aiming for.
For a moment, the weapons systems are hers. She thinks a q-dot torpedo around the ship’s last remaining strangelet bomb, subatomic fury and chaos she can fire with a blink.
She opens her eyes.
‘I don’t care if you are the Dark Man himself,’ she says. ‘I’ll take out the router and both of us with it if you don’t let Perhonen go.’
Sumanguru’s butterfly face looks more human now, heavy jaw and forehead and nose and what look like scars, sketched by flickering wings. But the eyes are hollow.
‘Be my guest, little girl,’ it says. ‘Go ahead. I don’t have much to live for. Do you?’
The trigger burns in her mind like a candle. It would be so easy. One thought, and the strangelet will end it all, wash her away in gamma ray and baryon rain.
‘Here’s the deal,’ Sumanguru says. ‘You disarm whatever trap le Flambeur has on the Realmgate. I come out. You get your ship back. Everybody is happy. How does that sound?’
What happens if she dies here? The pellegrini will bring another Mieli back. Choices like precious gems. It could all be up to someone else, not her. Saving Sydän. Dealing with the thief. Another her could do it, and it would not make a difference to anyone.
Except to Perhonen.
She feels the ship’s pain, its systems seething with an alien presence, her song defiled. I can’t let her down.
‘Well?’
‘You win,’ Mieli says.
10
TAWADDUD AND ALILE
Councilwoman Alile is a labyrinth.
Tawaddud watches her move behind the haze of Seals. It makes her think of the nursery rhyme Chaeremon the jinn used to sing to her.
It is in our food, it is in the air, it’s even in our hearts and that’s just not fair. But if you keep a clean mind, whisper Secret Names to the Aun kind, if you do what you are told, you too can tame wildcode—
Alile fills the bright, tetrahedral workspace of her palace on the Soarez Shard almost completely.
She is a tangle of glowing sapphire pathways, transparent fleshy cables and blooms of tiny, waving tendril
s. She stretches across the floor and up the walls and around tables and statues like some exotic sea creature, graceful in the ocean depths but limp and helpless washed up on the beach. Some of her has grown into the walls, merging with the clear diamonoid tiles of the palace, pushing through towards the outside world in spiky branches. In the middle of the web is a misshapen sac that looks like the belly of a mosquito, filled with blood, with knotted organs floating inside it, pulsing.
The haze of the Seals in the hallway – silver and golden graffiti in the air that the muhtasibs have woven around the infected part of the Alile’s palace – obscures some of it, but not enough. There is a stinging smell of burning dust and metal in the air.
Tawaddud tries to look at her like a doctor. She has seen wildcode do terrible things to her patients, but this—
After a few seconds, she has to turn away and cover her nose and mouth with a hand.
‘I did warn you,’ Rumzan the Repentant says.
Alile visited Tawaddud’s father once. She was a dour-looking woman, spare and lean, with a weather-beaten face, dressed in the stark, practical clothing of a mutalibun, with straps and hooks for Seal armour, athar glasses hanging around her neck. Alile’s hair was black and long, but she had a continent-shaped patch of rough, hairless sapphire in her skull, making her look like one of Duny’s old dolls, with some of its hair torn out in a tantrum.
Unlike normal muhtasibs who carried their jinn companions around in a jar, Alile’s qarin lived in a mechanical bird, with feathers of gold and scarlet and eyes of ebony, made from a metal so thin and delicate it could actually fly. Tawadudd always imagined it amongst the rukh swarm that carried Alile’s ship to the desert, giving its mistress eyes that saw the wildcode storms and mad jinni. Her name is Arcelia. She is the sensible half of me, Alile said.
Tawaddud wanted nothing more than to be like Alile.
But this is why you should not become a mutalibun.
Tawaddud becomes aware of Sumanguru standing next to her.
‘What can you tell me about what happened here?’ he asks Rumzan. The Sobornost gogol was silent throughout their brief carpet ride from the Station, indifferent to the vistas of Sirr below them. Matter: what kinds of heaps it’s piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him. But now his eyes are alive, full of cold curiosity.
Rumzan spreads his skeletal fingers. He is a thin, elongated creature whose wispy feet barely touch the ground. His body is covered in intricate, interlocking tiles of white, red and black that make him look like a living mosaic: by Sirr law, jinni thought-forms cannot look human. He has a glowing golden symbol on his forehead, indicating Repentant rank, third circle. The jinni policemen rarely wear visible shapes – their primary task is to stay invisible, root out crime and body thieves. Rumzan smells faintly of ozone, and every now and then he becomes grainy and crackles. To Tawaddud, he seems familiar, from one of her father’s parties, perhaps.
‘We have a partial reconstruction of the lady’s movements yesterday from athar traces,’ Rumzan says. ‘She arrived back from an early Council meeting around nine in the morning. We can provide a record of the meeting and her schedule, although you will have to request access to the detailed minutes from the Council.’ Rumzan makes a high-pitched humming sound.
‘I understand that may be a somewhat . . . delicate matter. In any case, the Councilwoman took her lunch in the rooftop garden alone, went up to her private observatory and then went into her office.’ He points at the wildcode-filled space ahead.
‘Then – the infection hit. It was so violent and sudden that we can only assume she had a Sealed container with a wildcode-infested object in it, which she opened. From speaking to the housekeeper jinni, I understand she used to be a mutalibun and brought mementos with her from the desert. With her experience, she must have been aware of the consequences of such an act. The infection must have taken hold in seconds. In other words, effectively the lady Alile committed suicide.’
‘How was the infection contained?’ Tawaddud asks. She remembers the drills Chaeremon made her go through as a child, the Secret Names to speak if her father’s palace ever experienced a wildcode attack.
‘The housekeeper jinn Khuzaima – who you are welcome to speak to – alerted us and the muhtasibs,’ Rumzan says. ‘The spread of the infection was slow and restricted to the Councilwoman’s body, as far as we can determine. That should not be surprising: after all, this is the residence of a muhtasib, with several layers of Seals everywhere.’
‘Are you sure you cannot provide a more accurate reconstruction than that?’ Sumanguru asks. He is staring at the walls, frowning. ‘Could anyone have brought in the wildcode from the outside?’
Rumzan spreads his hands: his fingertips flutter like candle flames. ‘My Repentants are good, but there are limits to what we can do with the athar. Especially now that the ambient wildcode levels are much higher than normal. Athar traces decay quickly. However, as for outside access, like with all Council members, the palace is under constant Repentant surveillance. All comings and goings of both jinni and humans are accounted for. But we do not know what happened inside.’
Sumanguru narrows his eyes. ‘My branch would call this a locked room mystery,’ he says. There is a strange note of amusement in his voice.
‘My sister said this was a possession,’ Tawaddud says. ‘How can you be sure of that? Have you found a possession vector?’
‘Nothing,’ Rumzan says. The jinn turns his glowing symbol at her like an eye. ‘Nothing forbidden. No books, no athar stories. Of course, the athar here is very complex, so we may have missed something. Given the circumstances, a suicide is a natural hypothesis, although there is no suicide note – and it seems unlikely, given the ardour with which she has been preparing for the Council voting session, according to her aides. That would seem to support the conjecture that when taking her own life, the Councilwoman was . . . literally not herself.’
‘So it is just speculation?’
‘Yes. However, it appears to be the only line of enquiry that fits the facts. Another complication is that we have not been able to find her qarin.’ Rumzan’s face tiles arrange themselves into something that looks like the facepaint of a sad clown.
Sumanguru runs his fingers along the Seal haze at the door.
‘How long do they last?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘How long would my Seals last in there?’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Tell me,’ Sumanguru says.
‘I don’t know. Two to three minutes? They tell me sobortech is more vulnerable to wildcode than we are, so perhaps less. But you should wait for the muhtasib, they can—’
Before she can finish, Sumanguru steps through the Seal wall.
A faint aura shimmers around him in the athar. He walks past the remains of Alile, head turning, looking everywhere. Tawaddud wonders what kind of range of senses he has beyond human. He touches things, the empty jars on the high tables, traces the arabesque patterns on the walls. His movements seem different, not so much a clumsy, unstoppable machine but a cat, looking for something.
Then he stops in front of a wall with an ornate pattern of graphical representations of Secret Names, geometrical shapes on a four-by-four grid, made from multicoloured ceramic tiles the size of a palm, inlaid with gold.
In the athar, Tawaddud sees a black stain marring his Seals, spreading. Wildcode.
‘His Seals won’t hold!’ Tawaddud shouts. ‘Lord Sumanguru, get out! Rumzan, get help!’
The Sobornost gogol starts pressing the tiles. They move under his fingers. The Alile thing’s sapphire tendrils coil around his limbs but he is immersed in his work. There is a click, and a part of the wall slides aside, revealing a dark space. Sumanguru reaches within, brushing aside a sapphire tendril with his other hand. Then he is back through the Seal wall, clutching something in his arms: a metallic bird.
It looks smaller than Tawaddud remembers, but stil
l large for a bird, the length of her forearm, a hawklike, graceful thing with a forked tail. Its eyes are closed, covered by tiny golden lids.
‘Arcelia?’
Tawaddud holds the bird in her arms. She expected it to feel cold and metallic, but the feathers of its back are almost alive, sharp but warm, and the flywheel in its chest hums steadily, like a rapidly beating heart. She strokes it to soothe it, but with no effect. Whatever happened to her, she had time to hide it. The sensible part of her.
‘Explain a qarin to me,’ Sumanguru says, pointing at the creature. ‘In simple words.’
‘A qarin is . . . a jinn companion, entwined with a muhtasib,’ Tawaddud says, voice shaking slightly. ‘A qarin and a muhtasib are one being, brought together as a child by an entwiner.’
‘What you describe is a forbidden act to us, only for the Primes,’ the Sobornost gogol says. ‘Perhaps there are even more reasons to cleanse your city than I thought. Why is this thing done?’
‘It is a custom,’ Tawaddud says. ‘A symbol of the alliance between our two peoples. But it also allows the muhtasib to regulate the economy of the city. To see athar like the jinni do, to watch the flow of information, the shadows of everything in the athar, money, products, labour, people.’ She looks at Rumzan. ‘Directly, not through a primitive instrument like athar glasses.’
Sumanguru laughs, a resonant, barking sound. ‘Matter and mind. Dualism. Primitive distinctions. All is information. Are you saying that this creature, this qarin, contains remnants of the Councilwoman’s mind?’
‘No,’ Tawaddud says. ‘I’m saying that the qarin is a part of the Councilwoman’s mind.’ There is something wrong here. Why does he not know all this?
‘Perfect,’ Sumanguru says. ‘Repentant Rumzan, is there a quiet space in this palace? Somewhere where we would not be disturbed?’
‘Lord Sumanguru, if you don’t mind,’ Rumzan says, ‘in the capacity of the official investigator here, I am compelled to ask what it is that you are intending to do? I cannot let you—’
Sumanguru draws himself to his full height. ‘Perhaps your Council has not explained the situation to you,’ he says with a rumbling voice. ‘We are not all like my sisters the hsien-kus: not all gentle. There are those who say that the Great Common Task demands a cleansing here. If I can’t find the enemies of the Task, those voices may be heard. Do I make myself clear?’