Affirming her assessment, it took three calls of his name before he deigned to look down at them. His half-lidded gaze behind a pair of silver spectacles held a mix of boredom and annoyance. “Library’s closed,” he bellowed lazily. “Come back during regular hours.” He lifted a manicured clawed hand adorned in rings, waving them away like children.
“The library isn’t closed on Fridays,” Fatma replied.
The djinn’s pointed ears twitched as he muttered in Farsi before returning to Arabic. “Well, look at you knowing things. Good for you! I’m busy, however, so all the same.” He gestured to the table, where fragments of yellowed papyri lay pressed between sheets of spectral glass. There were gaps in the parchment, and bits more sat in a small nearby box.
“Is that Meroitic?” she asked, eyeing the script. “Second-century?”
Zagros turned, pursing a set of violet lips before drawling: “Third. But Meroitic, yes.”
Fatma leaned in, appearing to take an interest. When he was in a mood, it helped to impress his innate bibliophilia. Getting the century wrong was a special touch. Because his type lived to correct people. “I thought Meroitic was indecipherable. The lost Nubian language.”
“It has remained stubbornly unknowable,” Zagros admitted. He pointed to the bits of parchment between the infused glass, which glowed a slight jade. Where his claws touched, the script shifted and reformed into Arabic. “This we know means ‘door.’ This one ‘bird.’ But what does that mean when put together?”
Fatma almost suggested “door-bird,” but the librarian wasn’t known for his sense of humor.
“Deciphering words hasn’t helped us understand the language,” he bemoaned. “Two different matters, you see. I’m working on a theory that the syntax may be magically locked, purposefully obscuring itself. Quite crafty.”
Fatma glanced to Hadia, nudging in the djinn’s direction. She caught on quick. “Where is this book … from?” she asked.
“The mortuary tomb of Amanishakheto!” Zagros answered, his golden eyes excited. “One of the famed Kandake! This could be a funeral dirge: a lament to their gods or philosophy on the afterlife. We have it on loan from Soudan. It’s been sitting in their collections, while those Sufis spend all their time searching for radical numerology in sacred geometry. You let some people read Marx…” Catching himself, he looked to them as if seeing wholly new people. “It is refreshing to hear an appreciation of alphasyllabic script. How may I help you today, agents?”
“We’re looking for works on al-Jahiz,” Fatma said.
The djinn arched an eyebrow. “More than a few of those.”
“The better biographies and contemporary accounts.”
Zagros tapped contemplatively on a pair of ivory tusks that curved up from his mouth. The tips were capped in silver and stringed with tiny bells that tinkled at his touch. “The more popular historical biographies are by Ghitani. Then there are the literary accounts by Mahfouz and Hussein. Religious interpretations by Soudanese fakirs…” He turned, muttering and walking out into the library.
Fatma and Hadia followed close. The djinn was faster than his size suggested, and they kept up by catching glimpses of his fluttering robes around corners—and the chiming of tiny bells.
“That was a quick turnaround,” Hadia whispered. She yelped, just managing to catch a thick tome tossed by Zagros.
“Djinn are a lot like the rest of us,” Fatma said. She plucked a book out of the air that came flying, without stopping her stride. “They just want to know the odd things they’re interested in are appreciated.”
“Like my cousin who collects automata birds,” Hadia noted. “But why are we doing this again?” She caught a second book atop the first and smiled in satisfaction.
“You said it earlier,” Fatma answered, casually catching two more. “Someone is running around the city claiming to be al-Jahiz. Someone who was at the scene of a murder of a brotherhood dedicated to his memory. Al-Jahiz is the one thread that ties the two.”
“You’re thinking whoever is masquerading as al-Jahiz probably created his persona based from books like these. And Lord Worthington’s brotherhood did the same. We’re not building a profile of al-Jahiz; we’re building one on how people remember him.”
The woman was good, Fatma had to admit. There was a yelp as another large tome soared at them, causing Hadia to drop her stack. But she was going to have to get better at catching books.
Some hours later they sat amid stacks arranged along the length of a table—the only sound the constant whoosh of the swinging pendulum. The librarian had provided them with more material than they could get through. They’d tackled the popular ones first before moving to the obscure titles. Hadia took notes with pen and paper as they went, unable to convince Zagros to let her bring down a typewriter—what he called a vexatious and cacophonous machine. Still, she’d written up several pages. Reaching the end of a sheet, she stopped to flex her hand.
“I think it’s cramped.” She winced.
Fatma rested her own book, and her exhausted eyes. “Read back what we have.”
Hadia rummaged through her sheets, before lifting one out.
“Al-Jahiz. Well, the first thing is, no one really knows his name.”
That was something all the books and accounts agreed upon. Al-Jahiz wasn’t actually a name, more like a sobriquet. The most famous man in modern memory couldn’t even be assigned something as simple as a name.
“It’s uncertain whether he adopted the title or if it was given,” Hadia continued. “Either way, most writers agree it’s the source of the arguments over his origin and the schools of thought that have popped up. The Temporalist school claims he’s a time traveler, and one and the same with the ninth-century al-Jahiz of Basra.”
“Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr Baḥr al-Kinānī al-Baṣrī,” Fatma recited.
“Nicknamed al-Jahiz.” Hadia nodded. “The boggle-eyed. Not very flattering. Most today think he suffered from a malformation of the cornea. Not much is known of his early life, but he’s credited with writing over two hundred books—if the stories are to be believed—on everything from zoology to philosophy. The Temporalists claim the two al-Jahizes are one. However, there’s nothing about the medieval al-Jahiz that says he was an inventor. They’ve probably mixed him up with the thirteenth-century al-Jazari. The mistake’s been pointed out, but they’re pretty insistent, some even claiming al-Jahiz came back first as al-Jazari. They don’t even have his background right! The first al-Jahiz was likely Abyssinian. Everyone agrees the modern al-Jahiz is from Soudan. And no one mentions him being boggle-eyed. So the reason for the title remains a mystery.”
“People find all sorts of ways to make their logic work,” Fatma replied. Temporalism had become popular among mechanics and the more science-minded. Every few months, the Ministry got a case of one of them attempting to build a time machine using unlicensed magic and unstable alchemy. The last one tried inside his apartment building. Didn’t time travel, but managed to transport half his floor ten blocks away—into afternoon traffic.
“Then there are the Transmigrationists,” Hadia read. “The school arose among some Sufis, who use the concept of tanasukh to argue for metempsychosis. They claim the modern al-Jahiz is a reincarnation of the first. But it’s considered heretical, denounced by the ulama and even the majority of Sufis. Most of its followers today are Buddhist or Hindu. There’s a festival for it in Bengal.”
Heretical or not, ideas of al-Jahiz reborn were widespread, and not just among unorthodox Sufis. Despite it being dismissed as some rural custom, you could easily find Cairenes who said the same.
“There are about a dozen more schools about his origins.” Hadia lifted up several sheets. “The Sufis in Soudan think he’s a herald of the Mahdi. Some Copts see him as a harbinger of Armageddon. None make any more sense than the other.”
“They don’t have to. Al-Jahiz’s ambiguity lends itself to interpretation.”
“People define him how they want.�
�� Hadia caught on. “So, an imposter…”
“… never has to get specific,” Fatma finished. “That crowd last night. They saw al-Jahiz in that man in the gold mask. Never mind if they all had different ideas of who he was. Al-Jahiz is so wrapped up in myth and rumor, he can be whoever they want him to be.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“Why the Ministry takes men claiming to be al-Jahiz seriously. He’s not the first. But they’re always trouble, because of what they stir up in people. People willing and wanting to believe. Even when they’re half-mad.”
“Did this one look that way? Half-mad, I mean?”
Fatma shook her head, remembering those eyes. Intense, yes. But nothing about them looked mad. “So we know what we don’t know about al-Jahiz. How about what we do know?”
Hadia shuffled her notes again, lifting out another page. “The first mention of al-Jahiz is usually given to al-Hajj Umar Tal, the later conqueror and founder of the Tukulor Empire. In 1832 he was a wandering mystic. On his way back from hajj, he meets Ibrahim Basha, then a military commander on campaign in Syria. Umar Tal healed the future basha’s son of an affliction before famously prophesying the coming of a man he claimed would shake up the world. He called him by the title ‘the Master of Djinn.’”
Fatma recalled what the old man in the crowd had said. The Master of Djinn—one of al-Jahiz’s famous honorifics.
“It’s thought that around this time the man who would become al-Jahiz was part of the basha’s Soudanese regiment, made up of slave soldiers. Some even claim he was sent with a battalion to Mexico to put down a rebellion against Napoleon III in the 1860s. But that sounds like another rumor. Because by then he’s no longer in the Egyptian army. He appears for the first time with the title ‘al-Jahiz’ in 1837 in Soudan, preaching against slavery in the company of a tall mysterious figure—that most people now think was a djinn.”
“Eighteen thirty-seven,” Fatma echoed. She picked up a book, flipping to what she wanted. “The same year of the Egyptian-Abyssinian border skirmish, after tax collectors kidnapped an Ethiopian Coptic priest in Soudan. The Abyssinians handily defeated the local Egyptian garrison, freeing the priest. The survivors claimed the Abyssinians used ‘sorcerous weaponry.’”
“Al-Jahiz vanishes from all accounts for thirty-two years,” Hadia picked up. “Then, in 1869, inexplicably arrives in Cairo. Starts teaching alchemy and what he calls the ‘lost arts,’ performing some of the first ‘great wonders.’ His secret street schools start gaining followers.”
“Then in 1872, Isma’il Basha annexes Abyssinian territory, starting a war,” Fatma read.
“Which we lose, again,” Hadia added. “In just two days! This time people pay attention to soldiers talking about magic. Those years al-Jahiz was missing, it’s now thought he was in Abyssinia, following in the steps of the Prophet—peace be upon him. Likely the source of their weaponry.”
“Which the Abyssinians won’t confirm one way or the other,” Fatma groused. It was confounding why the monarchy was so secretive. There was a treaty between them now, and no hostilities in decades. Then again, Abyssinian rulers also kept live lions wandering about their palaces—which reportedly had the ability to speak. So maybe that wasn’t the oddest thing.
Hadia flipped through her notes before tapping an area with a pen. “After the 1872 war, Isma’il Basha learns about al-Jahiz and has him arrested as a traitor. But al-Jahiz wins him over with his teachings. The Khedive sets him up in Abdeen Palace to work his experiments. That’s where he makes most of his machines and transcribes his many books. It’s also where ‘it’ happens.”
Fatma didn’t need a primer. Every first year in the Ministry knew the story. Of how al-Jahiz built some grand machine of alchemy and magic. Of the day the entire palace was engulfed in light, that made the stone seem to warp and shimmer. Back then people had called it the work of the Khedive’s Soudanese sorcerer. Today, it was remembered as the boring into the Kaf, the weakening of the barriers between the many realms that forever changed the world.
“No one knows why he did it,” Hadia read. “Curiosity, mischief, malice. But the science has never been replicated.”
Fatma held her tongue, eyes wandering to the vault behind the swinging pendulum. That wasn’t precisely true. Al-Jahiz’s grand formula—the Theory of Overlapping Spheres—had been replicated exactly once, through a machine built by the angel Maker. He called it the Clock of Worlds. Maker had sought to use his invention to bring about the end of their world, until she and Siti destroyed it. The files on that case remained sealed to most. And what remained of the clock now sat only feet away in the vault, where the Ministry housed its most precious secrets.
“Over the next few months,” Hadia continued, “djinn begin appearing in small numbers throughout Cairo. Other places too. They keep mostly hidden, but the Khedive senses something grand is happening and makes a move for greater independence with the Ottoman Porte. Asks al-Jahiz to construct him weapons of magic. But he refuses. Angered over this, Isma’il Basha sends soldiers to confiscate his inventions. By the time they arrive, al-Jahiz is gone.” She looked up wryly. “Only about a dozen different versions of how that happened.”
That was understating things. Al-Jahiz had made the Khedive’s soldiers blind, before walking through their midst while they groped about. He had turned them into wisps of smoke. No, he’d turned them into winged rams that bore him away. Or had he flown off on the back of a djinn? No, it was a mechanical djinn. A chariot pulled by djinn. Or golden-winged rukhs.
And so it went.
The only thing anyone knew for sure was that in 1873, al-Jahiz disappeared, taking most of his machines and writings with him.
“I have a cousin who fancies himself an augur,” Hadia related. “He swears al-Jahiz left piloting a great contraption that spun with endless wheels. And that even now he travels between the many worlds, bringing magic with him. But I guess none of that really matters. Because what impacts us today mostly happened after he was gone.”
“Aywa,” Fatma agreed. The ten years after al-Jahiz’s disappearance saw the rise of a nationalist movement as Isma’il Basha fell into debt and ceded greater control to European powers. The djinn mostly hid behind the scenes, but they were there too. It wasn’t until Tell El Kebir in ’82 that they made themselves fully known—where djinn magic joined nationalist fervor to drive the British from Egypt and into the sea. That event was now commemorated as the Emerging. Whatever became of al-Jahiz, it was them who created this new world.
“I just did the math,” Hadia said, scrunching up her face. “Al-Jahiz was maybe in his twenties in the 1830s. So by the time he disappeared he was in his sixties. Anyone claiming to be him today would have to be what—a hundred years old?”
“The man I saw last night definitely didn’t look a hundred,” Fatma confirmed.
“You’d think people would take that into consideration. Wish we had some of his earliest followers around to speak against this imposter.”
“No chance of that,” Fatma said. Al-Jahiz’s core followers had disappeared shortly after he did, supposedly to take his most secret writings into hiding. The youngest of them would likely be in their seventies now, if still alive. The Ministry had been searching for them for decades, but had come up with nothing.
“What about these others last night?” Hadia asked. “The man who was really two? That part kind of confused me.”
“Still confusing to me,” Fatma replied. She rubbed at her side again. “I don’t know what that man was. Or how he did what he did. Had to be sorcery involved.”
Hadia nodded thoughtfully. “So what’s the connection to Lord Worthington?”
Fatma strummed fingers along the top of a book. She’d been considering this as they put together their profile. “Lord Worthington was a man so infatuated with al-Jahiz he created a brotherhood dedicated to him. From what I saw, they were hunting down even scraps of clothing, personal possessions—anything. Like holy relics. Men o
bsessed with al-Jahiz to the point of wanting to own him, to be a part of him, to maybe be him.”
Hadia’s eyes rounded. “You think the imposter belongs to Worthington’s brotherhood?”
“It’s the best I can come up with. Someone immersed in al-Jahiz. Someone in the know about Lord Worthington’s brotherhood. Even the night it meets up. And where. Someone who could get into his mansion unseen and undetected. Too many pieces there to not fit.”
“But why?”
Fatma closed the book. “Maybe a resentful employee. Someone who wanted the English Basha out of the way. Or a member of the Brotherhood who took this al-Jahiz thing too far.”
“Sounds plausible. But it doesn’t explain the possible Ifrit.”
“No,” Fatma admitted, recalling the strange fire. “But one mystery at a time.”
They were interrupted by Zagros, coming to tower over them.
“The both of you do realize,” he drawled, “that it’s polite to be quiet for other patrons.”
Fatma looked around the empty reading room. “We’re the only patrons.”
“Then you should be quiet for your own sakes.”
The two women exchanged glances. It appeared their good graces had worn off.
“It seems, however, today I’m not only a librarian but a messenger.” The djinn extended a small rolled tube, disdainfully held between clawed thumb and forefinger. “This arrived for you by boilerplate courier. They weren’t able to come further than the lobby, so I was forced to walk up an entire flight of stairs—since these lifts can’t accommodate my healthy weight—and back down again. Only to find, the missive wasn’t even for me. Isn’t that a delightful story?”
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