A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  Argument and insults didn’t get us a dhow for Usirudi. An offer of what Khamisi considered a ridiculous overpayment finally interested the proprietor of one small, shabby dhow, little more than a dugout with one slanting sail and a beat-up outboard motor. But that was only the beginning of the negotiations. Khamisi felt it important to mention that taking us to the wrong island, or taking us out to sea and throwing us out of the dhow, or attempting in any other way to defraud us, would be extremely bad luck and would definitely entail the loss of the half of the fee which would be paid on our safe return to Mombasa.

  Jumanne, proprietor of the ngalawa, mentioned that he had agreed to that miserly fee only on the understanding that it would all be paid up front.

  Khamisi said that he might be persuaded to pay sixty percent of the exorbitant fee now, but that Jumanne should know we happened to have a shetani of our own which would take any attacks upon us very poorly. On cue, Mr. M. croaked a few bars of the Marine Corps Hymn and flashed his lasers at the dhow owner.

  They eventually reached an agreement at seventy-five percent down, the rest upon our safe return.

  “Usirudi!” one of the others called mockingly as we boarded the little craft. “I’ll comfort your wife when you don’t come back, Jumanne!”

  The three hours of sailing south on a tiny dhow should have been a romantic experience of blue sea and steadily lightening sky, white sand beaches to our right – sorry, I never can remember whether that’s starboard or port – and clusters of coconut palms around whitewashed buildings. I’ll have to go back and take that tour of Wasini some day; wondering whether the dhow owner is going to throw you overboard to avoid landing on the “island of devils” takes all the romance out of the most scenic dhow voyage.

  We had plenty of time to talk and plan, anyway.

  On the way, Khamisi explained that the superstitions attached to Usirudi Island had made it difficult for us to get passage there. It started with the name: Usirudi was Swahili for “you don’t come back,” and it got worse from there. The ghost stories and the tales of infestation by majini had probably been encouraged by pirates who found it convenient to scare people away from the island.

  “I thought you said pirates didn’t come so far south.”

  Khamisi grinned. “I said Somali pirates don’t. I didn’t say anything about Kenyan, Tanzanian, or Zanzibari pirates. Just because those Somalis get all the publicity, you should not assume they are the only ones operating off this coast.”

  Oh, that was tremendously reassuring. Even after Khamisi added that the Somali pirates got the most attention because they were the most brutal of the lot, I couldn’t feel there would be any upside about encountering a pirate from some other country. But then, we weren’t cruising for pleasure – something it occasionally became difficult to remember in the balmy weather, surrounded as we were by blue-green water and motoring past white beaches. We were heading south to tangle with people even worse than pirates.

  I remembered the one article I’d read that mentioned this island. The writer had claimed that al-Shabaab was responsible for terroristic activities there.

  Khamisi shook his head. “They may have had ambitions, but it really is too far south for a group out of Somalia to control. No, if anybody is there it will be the Rashiduni. There was a Swahili city on Usirudi once, and the remains are in better shape than most because the archaeologists have never been able to keep laborers long enough to start a serious dig there. The Jeshi-la-Amani is probably hiding out in the ruins.”

  “Wouldn’t the buildings have mostly fallen down by now?”

  “Our ancient stone towns were built of coral blocks. The most damage to them has not been done by nature, but by people taking the stones to make new buildings. The worse the location’s economy, the better the ancient buildings have survived.”

  Oh, great. We weren’t just heading for a terrorist training camp; we were heading for a terrorist training camp surrounded by an elite fighting force.

  Brad took my hand. “Don’t look so fretful, Thalia. There’s a big difference between a bunch of African terrorists and somebody who’s been properly trained.”

  Yes, and one of the differences was that there were a lot of the former and only one of Lensky. The man had a pathological inability to reckon the odds against him. I’d seen that in him before. I blame John Wayne.

  I squeezed his hand and went back to running through my tools for influencing the situation. Teleportation was our ace card, of course; the simplest thing would be to sneak into the training camp under camouflage, grab the kids and teleport to a safe place. Trouble was, the only reasonably close locus would be Jumanne’s dhow, and I wasn’t entirely sure how safe that would be.

  Personal shields would be useful too, but I couldn’t shield Lensky or Khamisi individually; the best I could do would be to keep them close by me and raise a shield big enough to cover all three of us. I had no illusions about how well that would work once Lensky got into the spirit of the action. Too bad I couldn’t tie him up and leave him in the dhow with Jumanne while Khamisi and I snuck in to get the children. I looked fretful and nibbled on my fingernails.

  “At least we’ve only got to grab three kids, one each,” I murmured.

  Khamisi looked deeply unhappy. “Ah… Saliya, that is not quite accurate.”

  “I can hardly rescue everybody in the camp, not that most of them deserve rescuing,” I pointed out. “It’s going to be quite hard enough to teleport you two and three children out of there.”

  “Cannot your djinn help?” He nodded at Mr. M., who was comfortably snoozing around my waist.

  “Even so.”

  Khamisi took a deep breath. “Well, then. If you cannot take more than five people to safety, Saliya, leave me to find my own way out. You must take Tabari with you.”

  “Tabari?”

  “My half-brother. Our father divorced his mother two years ago. He has been angry ever since. When I came back from America, he had run away. Our father said he did not know what had happened to Tabari, but I found out.” Another slow breath before bursting out with what I’d just guessed had to be coming. “He had joined Jeshi-la-Rashiduni.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirteen… He does not know what he has done, he is a crazy kid; he just wanted to hurt our father.”

  “Rough on his mother, too.”

  “As I said,” Khamisi repeated, “a crazy kid. He thinks that he wants to hurt the whole world – at least that is what he said when he ran away. I think he is sorry now. I think he will be very happy to come home with us – with you.”

  “You know he’s at this camp?” But I sort of knew the answer to that also.

  “I saw him on the video.”

  At 5:14. I knew it!

  “I – we’ll see what we can do.”

  Not that it mattered at this point, but I felt marginally less guilty than I had about getting Khamisi entangled in our problems. His troubles with the Rashiduni had started before Zawadi introduced us.

  Khamisi lapsed into a brooding silence. I edged closer to Brad and laid my head on his shoulder.

  “It’ll be all right, Thalia. More than all right. We finally know what we’re doing!”

  He looked less reassuring than eager, this crazy man with his knight-in-shining-armor complex. He seemed totally confident of our ability to sneak past an army to extract four children, one of them probably kept separately from the others, from a training camp for child soldiers. Anybody would have thought he did this kind of thing before breakfast every morning.

  I didn’t think we knew what we were doing at all. Granted, I should have learned by now to be comfortable with that, since it was usually the case once the Center for Applied Topology got involved. Some things you never get used to.

  “Too bad we didn’t take time to get reinforcements,” he added. Sounding marginally less insane. “I should have called Finch… I wonder if we can get a signal from here?”

  “Brad! You e
ven try to call that man and I will throw your phone into the ocean. Are you still kidding yourself that he’s on our side?”

  “I don’t care how much he irritates you, Thalia, he’s a Company man.”

  “A Company man who has tripped us up at every turn of this investigation. He claimed LeShawn Taylor had died in the bombing; we know that was a lie.”

  “A misunderstanding.”

  “He demanded everything be run through his office, yet every single thing we’ve learned has come from outside that office. The thugs he met in Majengo beat up Ben and could have killed him if he hadn’t been able to teleport. Ben saw some of the same thugs in front of Prajapati’s store; how did they find us, if Finch didn’t point them there?” I thought of another thing. “And why did the Rashiduni suddenly demand that Khamisi blow up the CIA office to prove himself? Maybe Finch wanted Taylor dead. I will bet you anything you like that he never warned Taylor at all.”

  “He couldn’t have known the bomb would be a dud.”

  “Right! He assumed it was successful, and he fed us both a line of garbage about what he thought must have happened. He didn’t know I would make sure the bomb never exploded.”

  “You what?”

  Oops.

  I told him about the modification of Riemann fire I’d come up with to slow-cook the Semtex explosives until they crumbled and disintegrated.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to do that.”

  “No. I couldn’t trust you not to tell Finch, and if the Rashiduni found out, they’d have killed Khamisi.”

  “You couldn’t trust me.”

  The words fell between us like stones into the sea.

  18. Master of the glass

  Blue smoke wafted upwards through the open spaces above Omar’s head. The walls of the ancient town had withstood the ravages of time quite well; the roofs, with their long wooden supports, had mostly collapsed. He should recruit some builders and set them to renovating a few rooms before the next rainy season…

  Building was boring stuff; conquest was better. When he was lord of the Swahili coast, he would make slaves of the upcountry pagans and sacrifice any who couldn’t or wouldn’t rebuild his cities. He breathed in the smoke from his water pipe and let it flow out his nostrils, feeling the arousal that thoughts of conquest and dominion always brought him. The jini formed herself out of the floating smoke and twined herself about him, and he did not push her away.

  “Oh, master of the glass, what is thy will?”

  He fondled her with one hand, stroked the blue glass in which he had captured her with his other hand. One was soft and yielding, the other reassuringly cold and hard to the touch. So long as he kept that bottle intact, he could order her back into it at any time. So long as he had that power, she would bend to his will as it was proper a woman should bend before a man – any woman, human or jini or shetani.

  “I sent you to tell me of those wazungu. To tell me that they were dead or fled.”

  “Would it please the master to know that they are both?”

  “How so?”

  The jini’s laughter was low and thrilling, a promise of infinite delights. “If they fled to the ocean, should they not drown?”

  “Allah! Have you given them the running-sickness?” It was one of the torments that untamed majini, particularly those of the ocean, loved to inflict on humans. A man would waken to the sensation of paralysis; when he was able to move again, he would run blindly, screaming, until the jini guided him into the ocean.

  “You might say that. They are fled, and into the ocean.”

  “And drowned?”

  “Are they wachawi or majini, to breathe water and live? In my ocean all are equal; wazungu drown as easily as any other men.”

  Omar laughed softly.

  “Is the master pleased with my service?”

  “I am pleased.” But Omar was too drowsy from the bhangi he had been smoking to do more than pat her shoulder before lapsing into a dream in which he was Caliph of the Swahili Coast from Somalia to Mozambique. In his mind, the weathered gray stones around them were once again bright with white coral plaster, the pavement before the mosque covered with rugs for the men who knelt there to pray towards Mecca after he expounded the will of Allah to them and announced the punishments for those who had failed to please God through him.

  The jini looked down at him as he began snoring. “Who would have thought such a handsome vessel would be no better than a broken pot? If you had loved me as you did at first, Omar of Zanzibar, I would have splintered their vessel and sent them to the death you desired for them. But since you are a fool, I am content that my words should delude you.” True, wazungu in mid-ocean drowned as easily as any other mortals… but not when their boat was sound and the sea smooth as glass.

  She allowed her lower limbs to revert to their serpent form and tried to wrap her tail around that accursed blue glass bottle, but even in his drugged stupor Omar wrapped his hand tightly around the thing and clutched it to his bosom. So be it! Let him suffer the consequences deserved by those who take the words of a jini at face value. The wazungu had fled Mombasa, but they meant to attack Usirudi. She could have raised storms to capsize their pitiful little dhow and drown them, but now she would not. Perhaps they would break the bottle for her.

  ***

  Hours after we’d left Mombasa, Usirudi Island became a low outline on the horizon. We watched tensely as the boat drew into a shallow harbor with a small beach. I could see a scatter of small thatched huts in front of a forest. The village was quiet in the baking sun. A couple of men sitting on the sand were doing something with the nets spread out in front of them – mending them? In the shade of one wall, a woman crouched, cleaning fish; her right arm threw out a glittering shower of scales with each movement of the knife in her hand. An unappealing muddy path led away from the beach, past the huts and into the darkness of the interior.

  The friendly greetings and morning calls of Mama Aesha’s house might have been in a different world. The people here scarcely looked up at our arrival, but bent more closely over their tasks. I had a feeling that they had learned it was not safe to notice too much about visitors to their island. I pulled up my bui-bui and tucked the veil firmly over my nose and mouth.

  Jumanne tied his boat up to a pier that made the ones at Mombasa’s old harbor look like miracles of civil engineering construction, jumped out into thigh-deep water and waded ashore, haranguing the men with the fishing nets. Khamisi clambered onto the pier and bent to take the suitcases from Lensky, then offered me his hand onto the irregular surface.

  Keeping the folds of the bui-bui modestly in place was really a two-handed job; I was grateful for Khamisi’s steadying hand on my elbow as I picked my way onto solid ground. If the locals were watching, I hoped I was getting props for keeping my eyes modestly lowered. The fact was that the bleached driftwood of the pier, held in place by ropes here and nails there, demanded my total attention if I was to reach the sandy beach in one piece.

  We might have to move a little faster on the way out… oh, to heck with it, I could just teleport us from the training camp back to this boat, couldn’t I? As long as nobody moved the boat… maybe the pier itself would be a better locus, actually.

  Mr. M. was concealed under my bui-bui with strong instructions not to move, talk, or, God forbid, sing until we had left the village. Seeing him moving and talking would be sure to freak out people so superstitious that they called their home “Island of Devils,” and as for his singing, well, that usually upset anyone within earshot. Children would cry, birds fall out of the trees… you get the picture.

  Khamisi told me in an undertone that Jumanne was bargaining for the right to leave his boat at the pier and for a meal to be served to the crazy wazungu who had paid him for a tour of the ruins on the island.

  “How do you fit into the picture?” I whispered to him.

  Khamisi grinned. “I am the guide for the crazy wazungu, of course. He probably thinks that I a
m charging you an exorbitant fee for this trip and that he got only a small share of the money.”

  I didn’t really care what Jumanne thought, I just hoped he would finish his bargaining quickly. The beach was hot in the mid-day sun and the only shady place had a strong smell of fish. I sat on Lensky’s suitcase, pulled the bui-bui closer over my face and imitated a well-behaved woman. Or an inanimate black sack. The two seemed to be indistinguishable in the Swahili worldview.

  Food, when it came, was also not much like what came out of Mama Aesha’s kitchen. There was a lot of cornmeal mush, a reasonable amount of greens cooked to a limp defeat, and some chunks of fish swimming in a thin, tasteless sauce. I applied my small object manipulation skills to the stiff cornmeal mush, which served as a utensil for picking up bits from the other two dishes, and ate as much as I could get past the bui-bui. It wasn’t easy, but I had made the mistake of coming out here with no food stash. I needed to ingest calories now so that I’d be able to do some heavy-duty teleporting when the time came.

  The path to the ruins turned out to be even more unpleasant than it had looked at first glance. The beach where we’d landed was slightly higher than much of the island; the path took us down into a swamp where we had to pick our way through a tangle of mangrove roots in black water. “Do I want to know about snakes in the islands?” I murmured to Khamisi.

  “The villagers are pretty good about chasing them out of their territory.”

  “That would be very reassuring if this looked more like a village street and less like a black, stinking swamp.”

  Lensky, ahead of us, choked.

  “I suppose for you,” I said under my breath, “this is almost as much fun as being back on the Farm, doing a training exercise.”

  “Oh, more,” he breathed, “in real life the odds aren’t stacked against us nearly as much as they were in those exercises.”

  Considering that we were going up against a terrorist army, I differed with his interpretation. But we were supposed to be approaching quietly, so I shut my trap and concentrated on keeping the hem of my bui-bui out of the water. After all, I was having it easy on this part of the journey; I didn’t have to carry a suitcase full of an AK74-something with optical thingies and underslung grenade launchers, or whatever it was Lensky had said in his loving description of the rifles.