Jack Cloudie j-5

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I could play such a game,’ said Omar.

  ‘Yes, yes, but a better question is why would you want to?’ Boulous pointed to one of the retainers holding out a tray of delicate steaming kebabs for a small group of men wearing turbans. ‘Better to buy your food from a street vendor in the souks below the palace hills. Then at least you will know the true price you must pay up front.’

  Why would I want to? So I can bring down the bastards that sacked Haffa and stole Shadisa from me. I can think of no finer game than that.

  The two of them crossed the largest of the domes where the palace’s pavilions intertwined with numerous waterways, walking under an arched entrance and emerging into one of the adjoining rotunda. Omar noted that when seen from above, standing on the parapets of the guardsmen’s fortress, the palace domes’ crystal surface appeared to shimmer in a medley of colours, but from inside there was a uniform appearance of a slightly shaded sky — as if the roof hardly existed at all — and god himself was writing the words of the hundred sects’ holy teachings across the heavens.

  As new to palace life as Omar was, it was easy enough to recognize the domain of the womb mages, the delicate sophistication of bulb-shaped pavilion towers and calligraphy-engraved marble walls giving way to a featureless ziggurat made out of a dull, brooding stone. The building was so out of place it looked as if a squadron of draks might have lifted it out one of the dark, distant provinces of the south and dropped it down onto the hills for the Caliph Eternal’s architects to raise a dome about its bulk. Unlike many of the palace’s grander buildings, there were none of the caliph’s soldiers standing sentry outside. For who in their right mind would want to disturb the peace of such men as dwelt inside the ziggurat? The main doorway at its foot was guarded only by the twin serpents from the garden of life, carved in stone above the entrance and intertwined in the shape of a helix, the womb mages’ ancient symbol, hung up outside their surgeries in bazaars. Unfortunately for Omar, the inhabitants of this building weren’t simple healers, able to encourage a fisherman’s finger to grow back after proving too careless with a scaling knife, available to craft a changeling virus to bless a soon-to-be-born child with extra height and strength. Here lurked the guardians of the caliph’s private library of spells; secrets that dated back to when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, had led his people into the desert and made life bloom there, rediscovering the one true god who had been lost for so long. Womb mages powerful and dark, trained in the heart of the sorcerer’s own city, Mutantarjinn, their dark domain scored out of the very rock by the sight of god when the highest of highests’ eyes reopened after sleeping for so long.

  Even if the womb mages inside the ziggurat hadn’t embraced the troublesome new sect, Omar would have avoided them like the plague in the normal course of affairs. Avoided them in the same way people avoided an undertaker; because they touched dead flesh as well as living, and the things they did to slaves, especially women, did not bear thinking about. It was for good reason that when slaves were bred, the slaves themselves prayed for males and the masters — thinking about the resale value of their progeny — prayed for females.

  Boulous placed his hand on a glass panel set in the wall and a light appeared as if a lantern had been lit behind the crystal; a short while later, a small iron sally door set within the larger gate opened. A eunuch wearing robes marked with the twin snake helix bade them enter, making a snide comment about having to open the gate to a mere jahani, a discourtesy which the retainer and Omar both chose to ignore. Inside, they were led through stone passages, corridors made an indeterminate size by an ethereal red illumination that revealed little.

  ‘It is dark inside your corridors,’ said Omar.

  ‘There are things grown here that would not benefit from brighter light,’ said the eunuch guiding them. ‘Does it scare you?’

  ‘Me? I am as brave as a sand lion. Besides, I prefer the darkness,’ said Omar. ‘In darkness all women look beautiful and even the stalest of bread appears a banquet.’

  ‘You will like it here then,’ muttered the eunuch.

  They travelled further than the length of the ziggurat Omar had seen outside and he realized that they must now be travelling underground, the womb mages’ domain stretching to chambers and corridors carved out below the hill itself. Their passage intersected a far larger one and Omar tripped over the first of a pair of metal rails set in the floor when he made to cross the space. As Boulous extended a hand to help him up, the eunuch raised a palm to stop the two of them going any further. A rumbling grew louder in the half-light, a sled-like affair on rail-locked wheels being drawn down the passage by a team of twenty bare-chested slaves. The sled was mounted by a tall glass box, as if the slaves were pulling a giant aquarium behind them; a thick mustard-yellow gas swirled about inside.

  Omar caught a glimpse of the glass case’s occupant as it passed and nearly stumbled again. It looked like a woman struggling underneath the crush of an albino whale, choking in the yellow stew. But as the mist momentarily cleared he saw it was the woman’s own body that curved out into a whale-sized appendage, her lower ribs as large as the archways around the palace pools and hung with rolls of flesh so gargantuan she looked as if she was drowning in her own frame.

  Omar grasped the eunuch’s shoulder. ‘She’s suffocating inside there!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the eunuch, disdainfully removing Omar’s hand. ‘The gas is a nutrient bath. No producer can eat enough through her mouth to feed both herself and her load. The skin of her womb must absorb the food directly. That producer’s load is a mine worm. Not quite as large as a drak when it’s born, but large enough to need a gallon of food pumped into the producer’s tank every hour during her second trimester. Ours is not an easy vocation, it requires both precision and dedication.’

  Omar watched the sled disappear down the rails with horror, imagining his mother’s face swollen and red, as she choked on the mustard-coloured fumes of her food. ‘What will happen after the birth?’

  ‘The mine worm will be taken to the mountains at Riyjhi — the Caliph Eternal’s prospectors have discovered many new veins of silver there.’

  ‘No,’ said Omar, ‘to her.’

  ‘The producer will be normalized and rested for a month,’ said the eunuch as if he was talking to a child. ‘You can’t keep them breeding constantly. Not unless you want to receive a whipping for a miscarriage.’ He pointed to the disappearing sled. ‘Lose an expensive load like that and you would be made to feel it. Two thousand tughra. And it will cost the caliph as much as that to raise your drak; remember the cost next time you choose to dive around the sky as if you are flying a five-coin hawk bought for you at the bazaar by your mother.’

  What if that’s been done to Shadisa, what if that’s the life the bandits sold her into?

  ‘Be careful what you say,’ Boulous warned the eunuch, ‘and who you say it to.’

  ‘I know who the House of Barir is,’ sneered the eunuch, looking at Omar, ‘or who it was. Old money. A manta ray with a modified spleen system and gills that filter salt. Not so difficult. The witches that walk the dunes with the nomads no doubt consider salt-fish quite a feat of sorcery out in the borderlands. Here in the Jahan we are not impressed with such petty trickery.’

  Omar and Boulous followed the eunuch down a passage lined with mesh-gated doors, each giving onto a lifting room that appeared to lead deeper into the catacombs beneath the palace. They passed by the doors to the lower levels, however, and the eunuch took out a punch card tied to the end of a chain from under his robes. Advancing with the card in his hand he inserted it into a small injection slot by the side of a door at the end of the passage. His key caused the door to retract upwards into the ceiling. Their shadows fell onto a long gantry, and stepping out, Omar saw that they were entering a cavernous space, the gantry emerging fifty feet up, carved out of stone as if a bridge. This was no natural cavern, though — its walls curving in and out like the surf of a sea frozen soli
d — the cavern floor and the gantry they were standing on the only flat surfaces to be seen. Down below in the blood-red light from wall plates, hundreds of womb mages sat dotted around circular tables, the copper-plated books they were reading from glinting under table lamps. Shelves had been carved out of the cavern’s undulating walls, filled with the same type of book Omar had helped destroy with acid in his father’s house at Haffa. There must have been hundreds of thousands of the mages’ spell books racked below, even the dozens of stone columns rising up to the cavern’s roof were carved with shelves and heavy with books. Standing on the stone gantry pushed out like a mooring into this sea of knowledge, Omar watched shelf stackers on rail-mounted harnesses being lowered and raised by slaves working winches to retrieve requested tomes. The vastness of the cavernous space echoed with a low humming as the seated womb mages repeated the letters of their spells, A, C, G, T, over and over again in seemingly random patterns. Committing to memory the structures of flesh that dark sorceries could create, their chanting interwoven with a gentle clicking from the turning copper pages.

  ‘So many books,’ whispered Omar in awe. It would take centuries to study them all.

  ‘This is the Caliph Eternal’s private library,’ said the eunuch, his chest puffing out with pride. ‘His private wealth. It is very old, but it pales in comparison to the size of the order’s own library in Mutantarjinn. There, just the indexing halls are larger than this library.’

  Omar found that hard to believe, that this colossal space carved out under the palace hills had its equal, let alone its superior, in any of the other cities of the empire. Whatever he believed, its hold over him was disturbed by the throb of a familiar soul calling out to him. It couldn’t be her, not here. But it was. Omar was thrown into confusion by the sight of the female slave who emerged from an open-caged lifting room at the end of the stone gantry along with two servants girls as companions.

  ‘Shadisa!’ Why didn’t I feel her sooner, and her presence here is so faint? What have they done to her?

  The look on her face turned from puzzlement to shock as she recognized the young man standing before her in the leather armour of a palace guardsman.

  ‘Shadisa, in the name of god, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I am in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa.

  ‘Thank the prophets! You survived the sack of Haffa.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Shadisa, with no small degree of disdain in her voice. ‘We were brought to Bladetenbul and sold. Only the men in the town were executed by the troops loyal to the Sect of Razat. Well, most of them. Why are you wearing that ridiculous uniform?’

  ‘Quieten your tongue,’ said Boulous. ‘You speak to an enforcer of the Caliph Eternal’s law, and a slave that speaks with such disrespect will find herself with a finger or two less to do her master’s bidding.’

  ‘A slave I may be, now, but I am a slave in the service of Immed Zahharl,’ said Shadisa haughtily. ‘The grand vizier of the Caliph Eternal, high keeper of the Sect of Razat, grand master of the order of womb mages and keeper of the caliph’s spells. You would be well advised to ask his permission before you touch me, little jahani. He is a good master and you may lose more than a finger for violating his property.’ She nodded towards the eunuch as an indication of what the retainer could expect as payment for his effrontery.

  Boulous snorted. ‘So you say.’

  Shadisa looked at Omar. ‘You are the guardsman I have been sent to collect for the creation of a new drak?’

  Omar nodded. She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, but there was something different about her. Something had altered in her soul.

  ‘Well, how the world changes.’

  The eunuch bowed and remained on the gantry, letting Shadisa and the servant girls escort Omar and Boulous into the lifting room, the fenced-in platform sinking towards the floor of the library.

  ‘Did you think I was dead?’ asked Omar.

  ‘Yes,’ said Shadisa, though with little of the joy that Omar had hoped she might display at finding herself proved wrong. ‘Most of the men died. The Sect of Razat’s followers burnt Haffa to the ground. We saw the flames as we were tied behind the bandits’ sandpedes and taken through the desert. As clouded as our minds were with those filthy drugs they injected us with to march across the desert, we watched the column of smoke hanging above the coast for two days.’

  ‘I tried to save you,’ said Omar. ‘I was coming for you, I saw bandits grab you in the kitchen.’

  ‘A fine job you made of it then,’ laughed Shadisa. ‘You protected me as well as you protected Gamila when her fiance’s servants were chasing her across the sands.’

  ‘I shall rescue you now, I will free you from this life,’ promised Omar, taking Shadisa’s hand. ‘You were not meant to be a slave — you were born the daughter of a freeman. I will buy out your papers of ownership.’

  ‘Was I free back in Haffa?’ said Shadisa, pulling away from him. ‘A couple of coins a week to work in the great master Barir’s kitchens? Buying food in the market, salting and smoking meats, cooking, washing dishes, serving the men of the house in the evening; up at five, not asleep before midnight. Do you know so little of what my life was really like?’

  ‘Back in the town, did your father …?’

  ‘He died too, I suppose,’ said Shadisa, sadly. ‘Unless he got out in one of the fishing boats. There were thousands of people in the harbour, fighting our own soldiers for the chance to escape. Begging, cursing, offering money to the boats that remained. Every man I knew is dead but you, Omar Barir. You have your damn father’s luck, alright. You could be thrown off a slave galley wearing only chains and you would wash up on some island with your shackles slid off, palm trees for your bed, dates to eat and a waterfall to bathe in.’

  ‘I have whittled my own luck with the tip of a scimitar, my great courage and my epic wits,’ said Omar. ‘And now my luck will be yours, too.’

  ‘Oh, your epic wits,’ laughed Shadisa, opening the gate to the lifting room as it shuddered to a halt. ‘Everyone in Haffa knew that the House of Barir had attached itself to a dying cause, that it was only a matter of time until the Sect of Razat replaced our own in the Holy Cent. Your father mistook stubbornness for honour, Omar, and our people paid the price with their blood as we always do. Recognizing you as his kin was just another selfish act, easing his conscience for his last few hours, and it should have seen you dead. We all knew our end was coming, but you, you and your epic wits, were lazing about on your water farm. You didn’t know and you couldn’t have cared less if you did.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Omar, stung by her words. ‘About my father and about me. I don’t know how he did it, but I know he saw me placed with the guardsmen. Now I have no house, I serve only the empire and the Caliph Eternal.’

  ‘Then we are alike,’ said Shadisa, leading them through the library. ‘For I serve a man who serves only the caliph too.’

  ‘I will set you free, Shadisa.’

  ‘Free to do what?’ asked the woman. ‘To be the wife of a common guardsman? To sit around on a hemp mat in a fortress cell and cook up a stew for the few days in a year when you’re not off with the army campaigning? I have seen another life here in the Jahan, Omar. A life of luxury; of water that flows out of a tap without an hour’s walk to a well head; of fine gardens and music and colour and splendour. Here,’ she tapped her long ornate tunic. ‘Silk, worth twenty times my slave price. Which of us apart from Marid Barir’s wives could afford to wear such silk back in Haffa?’

  ‘I would make you free,’ pleaded Omar.

  ‘A wife of a soldier, or a servant to the grand vizier,’ said Shadisa. ‘Which of those is more free?’

  ‘You ask the wrong question,’ said Boulous. ‘You should ask which of those is the right course under heaven?’

  ‘I have only been a slave for a few months, unlike you, little jahani,’ said Shadisa. ‘But I have been a woman for all of my life. I know which is
the better course.’

  Omar reeled in shock at her attitude. This was not the reunion he had dreamed of during the long, tiring hours of sword practice, during the hard days he had spent cleaning pistol barrels and oiling drak saddles. A grateful Shadisa falling into his arms as he beat off the slavers who had captured her was what he had imagined. How could she have fallen in love with the luxury of the grand vizier’s service so easily? She had never cared about such things back in Haffa. Plenty of the great house’s female servants had made it perfectly clear that a mere slave like Omar could never provide such luxuries and was therefore of no interest to them, but never Shadisa — this was not her. Has the grand vizier, this Immed Zahharl, bewitched her? Had Shadisa fallen under the chief minister’s spell as easily as Boulous had implied that the Caliph Eternal himself had?

  He lay his fears for her aside and followed the girl. Shadisa led Omar and Boulous to an archway bordered by towering stone shelves, the copper plates of the spell books looking as if they were slicked by blood in the crimson twilight. She bade them sit on a bench cut into an alcove while she went to fetch Immed Zahharl, leaving the two of them under the watchful gaze of the other two servant girls.

  ‘So, your pretty friend serves Immed Zahharl,’ Boulous whispered to Omar. ‘Immed Zahharl himself — he should not come to personally collect the blood of a drak rider.’

  ‘He wants to see me,’ said Omar, speaking softly. ‘To observe what an unbelievingly handsome fellow the last son of the House of Barir is for himself.’ He nodded towards the two slaves standing sentry over them. ‘That pair served in my father’s house too. The grand vizier sends us a message with their presence, don’t you think, Boulous? That a certain quick-witted hero of your acquaintance who currently wears a guardsman’s riding leathers, should really be wearing a slave’s robes, or a corpse’s shroud.’