A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  Not, I thought, something he would have picked up in Prajapati’s. “Did Nelson Finch get you those things?”

  Another flash of teeth. “The one thing I can definitely say in Finch’s favor is that he inspired me to reach out to nonstandard channels.”

  A typical Lensky non-answer.

  I blinked and realized that the illusion of undulating barrels hadn’t been entirely due to my concussion. Mr. M. was sliding all over one of the rifles, loving it to pieces. He had long been agitating for grenade launchers to be retrofitted to the mechanical part of his body, and our engineer had been putting him off by claiming he wasn’t heavy enough to withstand the recoil. Right now, I was just glad she’d never fitted him with a trigger finger.

  “Leave it alone,” Lensky told Mr. M., “these have to go to people who can handle them. You’ll cover me?” He looked at Khamisi, who shook his head and backed away. At last, I’d met a man who wasn’t seduced by the Romance of the Gun.

  And it had to be at a time when we could really use another shooter.

  Lensky gave Khamisi a stern look. “Time to man up. If I have to go out on the street—”

  “You’re not going out on the street!”

  “Shut up, Thalia.” Back to Khamisi. “Even if I only throw bottles out the window, I’ll need somebody to cover me. And if they storm the back terrace, you’ll have to take over in the front while I defend the terrace. We can’t expose Thalia; she’s still our best ticket out of here. So it’s up to you and me to hold them up until she recovers enough to teleport. Well?”

  Khamisi gave a somewhat wobbly nod and bent to pick up the rifle that Lensky slid towards him.

  “At least he knows not to point it at us,” Lensky muttered, watching Khamisi’s tentative handling of the thing. “Thalia, have you got all the bottles prepped?”

  “You,” I said with a wave at our newly constructed stock of Molotov cocktails, “are enjoying this. Aren’t you?”

  “Ahh, now, I wouldn’t say that exactly.”

  But I would. His eyes were sparkling, his movements were deft and assured, and his hands were moving over that ugly black killing machine with the sort of caresses I preferred to see reserved for me.

  I closed my eyes and reached for the blackness of the in-between. Still wobbly, dammit. Lines and shapes and bright individual points swooped around my inner vision almost randomly, blurring in and out of focus.

  The shouting outside was punctuated now with thuds and crashes. What were they throwing?

  “Front room,” Lensky said. “Khamisi, cover me.” He filled his hands with wine bottles.

  “You’re not going outside!”

  He grinned and saluted me with a handful of Molotov cocktails. “Not yet. Have a little faith in me, Thalia.” For a square, solid man, he was remarkably graceful as he moved through the apartment, hands full of bottles, crouching past windows to present the smallest possible target. Khamisi trailed behind him, holding the rifle awkwardly. I hoped he would remember that he wasn’t supposed to shoot my husband in the back.

  A moment later I heard the sound of shattering glass from the front of the building, followed by yells and screams from the crowd. Brad slithered back to the living room to report cheerfully, “That’s given them something to think about… How are you feeling, Thalia?”

  “Still dizzy.”

  “Well, don’t worry. We’ve got plenty of ammunition! Watch the back, and call me if they get on the terrace.” He oozed back towards the front room, this time carrying the second rifle.

  I heard a stuttering rattle from what had been Victor’s bedroom. That would be Lensky and Khamisi shooting out, right? Not somebody shooting them… I felt an almost physical force tugging me that way. I needed to see Brad. But he’d given me a job to do…

  “Mr. M., can you go see what’s happening at the front?” He undulated off and I made my way back down the hall to our bedroom. How was I supposed to know if anybody was on the terrace? Brad had been much too thorough with his improvised shutters of flattened cardboard boxes. I pulled one corner away from the wall. A tack popped onto the floor and a sliver of light showed through the opening. I knelt on the bed and put one eye to the crack. The terrace faced west, and the setting sun stabbed directly at me. My eyes watered. But there was nobody on the terrace.

  Not yet, anyway.

  They came when the sun dipped behind the westernmost buildings of Old Town and plunged us into the sudden tropical night: a rush of bare feet, a rustle of robes, half-smothered exclamations.

  17. Island of Shetani

  I didn’t have to shout for Brad; Mr. M. peeked over my shoulder and zipped back to the front room, an undulating silver blur on the coconut matting. A heartbeat later, I felt Lensky’s reassuring bulk behind me. “Get back.” As I left my observation post on the bed, he ripped another slit in the cardboard with the tip of his rifle and sent a series of short bursts out onto the terrace. I heard a scream, a rush of retreating feet. Brad was laughing under his breath.

  Well, great. My loving husband was having the time of his life. By now he’d probably corrupted Khamisi; if I retreated all the way to the other end of the apartment, would I find the peaceable chemical engineer hurling flaming bottles and firing into the crowd with the greatest of ease? Most likely. Even Mr. M. was zipping back and forth through the apartment, buzzing, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

  Men.

  I had learned a couple of things from watching Brad shout at the television set about all the errors in the spy shows and shoot-em-ups he liked to watch when there weren’t any classic movies on. One, eventually everybody has to reload. Two, “plenty of ammunition” is not the same as “an infinite supply of ammunition.”

  So, as the member of the team who wasn’t busy shooting anybody, it behooved me to get back to exercising my particular skills before we ran out of ammunition.

  I really prefer to do mathematics in a quiet, well-lit space where nobody is screaming or trying to kill me. However, my fellow topologists and I have had our differences of opinion, some of them rather loud, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of working through noise. And the things we’d been involved in since Lensky and his agency took an active part in our lives had not exactly been peaceful. I took a moment for a confidence-building review. I’d successfully teleported in all manner of difficult situations, and I had the informal reports to document it: while being held at gunpoint (A Pocketful of Stars), grabbed by thuggish protestors (An Opening in the Air), threatened at gunpoint again (An Annoyance of Grackles) and dodging German bombs in the streets of London (A Tapestry of Fire). Surely I could get Brad and Khamisi and me out of this latest tight spot?

  Well… I’d never actually teleported while recovering from a slight concussion. But the key word there, surely, was ‘slight.’ I sidled into the living room and found a strip of torn sheet that hadn’t been stuffed into a bottle. Soaked it in the kitchen sink and wrapped it around my aching head, feeling a bit like Sydney Carton at his studies. Not that much like Sydney Carton, though, because I had no intention of doing a far, far better thing and sacrificing myself for the sake of my comrades. Our situation was kind of the reverse of his: we all needed me alive and functional if we were to get out of this. I sat down and leaned back against the chair, consciously relaxing my muscles, feeling the soothing coolness around my temples, breathing slowly and regularly.

  Closing my eyes, I put one hand in my pocket and felt the tiny electrical tickle of an infinite set of points of light dancing against my palm. I reached out through them to a sense of the universe around us. I breathed, “Brouwer,” in the hope that habit would strengthen my visualization. For a long moment there was nothing but the ordinary darkness behind my closed eyes. Then the greater vision became clear: absolute blackness surrounding me, infinite space, two surfaces shimmering with color and touching at just one point. Yes! I could do this. Now to collect Khamisi, Brad, and Mr. M. How was that going to work, when both guys were now
firing almost continuously from opposite ends of the long, narrow apartment?

  We’d have to be fast, that was all. And I’d have to go the minute I grabbed them. I unwound the strip of wet sheet and dampened the top part of my bui-bui instead, stepped into it, tucked the bottom part into my waistband and tied the head strings firmly. The cool, damp cloth felt good when I tucked it down over my forehead. Then I asked Mr. M. to tell Khamisi we were ready to go. He needed to drop his rifle and run to the back bedroom where Brad and I would be waiting for him, because now that the rioters had found the terrace we couldn’t afford to leave that end of the apartment unguarded for a minute. The front was slightly more secure, at least it would be if Khamisi had been discouraging anybody from rushing the stairs.

  I felt modestly proud of myself for that bit of tactical analysis.

  There couldn’t have been more than a few seconds to wait in the dark back bedroom, but it felt like forever with the rifle fire spattering in my ear and the damp bui-bui clinging to my face while I held the visualization steady: two glowing surfaces, a single point of identity, and our destination warped across the curve of the upper surface. Then Mr. M.’s metal scales wrapped over my shoulders. I put an arm around Lensky’s waist, grabbed Khamisi’s elbow, and concentrated. “Brouwer.”

  The in-between buffeted me in an unfamiliar way, as if it had developed the ability to create storms without matter. I felt pulled this way and that, couldn’t afford to slacken my concentration on the Brouwer visualization to figure it out; poured stars and all my thought towards the image of our destination. White walls and hard-packed earth, crouching, dark-clad figures… The brilliant images and dark backdrop of the in-between faded and the courtyard of Mama Aesha’s compound became solid around us.

  “Nani anakuja?”

  “Khamisi!”

  “Saliya? Kwa nini umeja…”

  The babble of Swahili coming from all sides was too much for me. I sagged against Lensky and he guided me to an empty kitchen chair. I thought it was the same one where I’d put in my time scraping coconuts and acquiring merit with the women of the family. Behind us, I heard Khamisi talking rapidly and sounding authoritative. The women stopped crowding us and gradually retreated, looking nervous.

  Oh. The guys hadn’t dropped their weapons after all, had they? I briefly resented having wasted mathemagical energy on teleporting those things. A boy appeared and gestured that Khamisi and Lensky should give him their rifles. And, much to my relief, someone closed the heavy spiked door that I had only seen standing ajar, and lowered a hefty plank of wood across it.

  “I thought we were going to the hotel!”

  Brad. That explained why this very short jump had been so difficult and draining. Not only was I recently concussed, not only did I have two hulking guys to carry with me, but one of those guys had – consciously or not – been trying to steer me in a totally wrong direction. I opened my eyes enough to scowl at Lensky. “You wouldn’t have held on to your rifles long at the Royal Court Hotel.”

  “We didn’t get to keep them for long here,” Lensky said with a pained glance at the interior doorway through which the kid had vanished. “And – where is ‘here,’ anyway?”

  It hadn’t been that long a jump, but I had the shakes. “I need something to eat.”

  Khamisi said something else in Swahili – several somethings else, actually – and Rifle Boy reappeared, carrying a plate of sticky candies. Mmm, jellabies – those sweet, deep-fried twisty tubes that Brad had bought me on the one day when we were trying to be a normal couple. Eating those was like mainlining sugar. I began paying attention to my surroundings.

  Zawadi was not here, which made things slightly more difficult – or not; I didn’t really feel like being our spokesman. No, I was more than willing to leave that task to Khamisi while I leaned back and explored the feeling of sugar and energy revitalizing the wrung-out dishrag I’d felt like minutes earlier.

  “This compound belongs to some of Khamisi’s family,” I explained to Brad during the occasional pauses in the rapid-fire Swahili debate going on all around us. “I’ve visited here before. They’re good people. They aren’t with the Rashiduni. Nobody will be looking for us here – and even if they did,” I said, thinking about that massive door, “this place, unlike our apartment, was built for serious defense.” I still wasn’t sure about the function of those nasty-looking spikes on the outside of the door, but they did send a message. Something along the lines of “No Solicitors,” but with more teeth in it.

  Eventually the impromptu Unexpected Visitors Debating Society broke up and Khamisi updated us on the arrangements. We would all three spend the night here, but he and Brad would be together and I would have to go in with the unmarried granddaughters. Very early in the morning we would leave here, quietly, and take back alleys to a place where we could get a dhow to the island where the training camp was located.

  Apart from the notion that there were any streets this deep in Old Town that weren’t back alleys, I was fine with this program. Brad was not quite so happy. He didn’t like having to let me out of his sight, and he didn’t like being separated from the rifles. In the interests of a harmonious marriage, I refrained from asking which of these two things bothered him most.

  Dinner happened about then, so we would have been separated in any case. To my everlasting regret, the convention about serving men separately deprived me of seeing how Lensky would cope with the two-fingers-rice-ball convention. I, however, successfully deployed my skills at small object manipulation to get myself a healthy sample of numerous dishes this time. My head still hurt, and the women told me with sign language that I had an impressive goose egg on the right side of my forehead, but there was nothing wrong with my application of topology now. They had this one dish of greens cooked with onions and tomatoes that would have made a veggie-lover out of anyone. And the things these people did with coconut milk… But I digress. We ate, we retired for the night, and approximately five minutes later by my internal reckoning I was scrubbing my sleepy eyes with a cloth dipped in cold water and putting on my bui-bui for the trek through the streets.

  I wasn’t up to noticing much at this hour, but I did see that Khamisi and Lensky were lugging two shabby but heavy suitcases whose contents shifted strangely as they moved. It wasn’t hard to guess what was in them. I oozed up beside Brad and lowered my veil a couple of inches. “Do those suitcases hold what I think they hold?” I mouthed.

  “Shush. Khamisi says we won’t be able to hire a boat if anybody knows what we’re carrying.” He eased the handles of his suitcase over to the other hand. “Too bad you didn’t think to rescue the gun case too.”

  “Whine, moan, complain. My hands were rather full at the time. Too bad you didn’t think about the gun case. Anyway, wouldn’t that make it too obvious what you were carrying?”

  “There is that.” He shifted the suitcase again. “On the other hand, it wouldn’t have come this close to falling apart on a short walk to the old harbor.”

  The waterfront: a sense of salt in the warm, heavy air, birds swooping and crying overhead, long rays of morning light passing over rickety wooden piers. In the echoes of the morning call to prayer, ragged boys danced and cartwheeled and tried to take our hands. “Jahazi, mashua, ngalawa?” they called. “Mnataka kuona pomboo?”

  One especially energetic kid danced right up between Brad and Khamisi and tried to grab their suitcases. “Mtaona pomboo mengi, bwana!”

  “La! Hatutaki pomboo!” Khamisi snapped.

  The boy fell back before us, his mobile little face expressing surprise and disbelief. “Hamtaki?”

  “He cannot believe that we do not wish to see dolphins,” Mr. M. croaked into my ear.

  Dolphins?

  I wouldn’t mind seeing some dolphins.

  Maybe we could come back?

  “La! Nenda!”

  “Wazungu wanataka daima pomboo.” The boy folded his arms like someone expressing an immutable truth: white people always
want dolphins.

  “These white people,” Khamisi told him, “do not want dolphins. They want to go to an island.”

  An older boy darted up, speaking a singsong English. “Ah, Wasini Island tour, very very good, only twenty thousand Kenya shilling!”

  “No.”

  “Ok, because you are Swahili, for you and friends only, special price. Ten thousand shillings for each.”

  “That’s even more, and we do not want to go to Wasini Island!”

  “Why not? Wasini is the best island!” He launched into a catalog of Wasini Island’s virtues which Khamisi cut off with three words.

  “Twenda kwa Usirudi.”

  The waterfront got very quiet.

  One of the men who’d been watching the interchange, grinning, turned around and began washing down the deck of his little boat.

  Two others seated themselves, arms folded, looking past us.

  It must have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that even the seagulls stopped screeching.

  “Kisiwa cha shetani,” somebody muttered. “Island of devils,” Mr. M. translated quietly.

  “What is the matter?” Khamisi demanded. “I am looking for a man to carry us, not a little girl who is afraid of shadows!”

  “It is too far,” another man muttered.

  “No farther than Wasini.”

  “Yes, but there are polisi on Wasini. They do not want the wazungu frightened away. No one goes to that other place.”

  “What are you afraid of? Pirates? The Somali pirates don’t come so far south. Are the dhow captains of Mombasa all cowards?”