The Fractal Prince

  Mieli hesitates. It is a dishonourable thing to do. But the Mieli she has become here would not hesitate, and this is a man who trades in gogols—

  Lord Salih’s head disappears in a burst of flame.

  ‘Too slow,’ Odyne says, a zoku q-gun floating next to her head. ‘You will have to be faster in the service of our new employer.’

  ‘Dear Odyne, you will excuse me if I regard hesitating before executing her employer a positive quality,’ says the mercenary, drawing her hood back. A brass eye stares at Mieli. ‘You will have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your talents where we are going.’

  ‘Mieli is one of my finest warriors,’ Odyne says. ‘Although she does seem to be having an off day.’

  ‘I am Abu Nuwas,’ the man with the brass eye says. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  The mercenaries sail over the wildcode desert in rukh ships, huge vessels kept aloft by swarms upon swarms of the chimera birds in vast blue clouds. The Teddy Bears have been joined by at least ten other companies, and the posthuman warriors carried by the vessels number in the thousands.

  Some of them fly under their own power, in gliders and other analog craft custom-made to survive the hardships of the desert. Abu Nuwas’s two flagship galleons, Munkar and Nakir, are surrounded by a halo of Fast Ones. Their shadows race below them in the desert as the sun sets.

  Mieli stands on the bridge of Nakir with Odyne, Nuwas and the other mercenary commanders. The lights of the Fast Cities dance in the distance, and the surface of the dark sea that used to be the Mediterranean has an eerie green sheen. They have lost a few craft already to sudden jinn storms, driven away by Nuwas’s muhtasibs, but the fleet pushes forward.

  Mieli? comes Perhonen’s voice suddenly.

  Thank Kuutar, Mieli whispers. Where have you been?

  In touch with the thief. He knows how to get to the jannah. But so does a man called Abu Nuwas.

  The ship fills Mieli in on the thief’s activities in Sirr. A conflict with hsien-kus and and the local authorities, and getting a girl into trouble. Why am I not surprised?

  He thought you were going to be in a position to—

  I am really going to kill him this time, Mieli says. Abu Nuwas has a whole damned army. It’s not like I can just slip into the jannah he digs up unnoticed and get our gogol.

  He said you would be pissed off.

  Well, he was right. Bastard.

  Apparently, he got the other thing he needed from Sirr. It’s up to you now, he says.

  Mieli sighs. Of course it is. Can you get me any imagery of this region?

  It’s all pretty weird over there. On Old Earth, you would have been flying over Turkey now. Lots of good places there to bury something.

  Whatever it is, it’s not going to stay buried for long, Mieli says.

  What are you going to do? I’m sorry about this, Mieli, I wish I could do more to help. I’m in touch with the pellegrini, she has been doing something in the Gourd—

  Mieli swears. This is not what was supposed to happen. The thief was not supposed to get involved in local politics, he just needed to get the location of the jannah. It was going to be a matter of sneaking away from her unit, retrieving the gogol and and transmitting it up to Perhonen.

  Let me talk to him, Mieli says.

  I hate to admit it, Mieli, but this did not go as well as I expected, the thief says. I was outmanoeuvred by a one-eyed merchant. If you think the situation down there is too difficult, perhaps we can cut our losses. It might be possible to use what I got, to get into Chen’s mind more directly—

  But you would still need the Founder codes for that.

  Yes, I suppose so, the thief says. And we don’t have much time. It sounds like there is going to be a straight-out war between the hsien-kus, vasilevs and the pellegrini sometime soon.

  War, Mieli says.

  Damn, the thief breathes. I’m just seeing your feed now. You would need a whole army to get to the jannah now. Leave it, Mieli. It was my fault, I screwed up. We’ll find another way.

  An army, she whispers.

  What are you talking about? the thief asks.

  Mieli ignores him, closes her eyes and prays to the pellegrini.

  25

  TAWADDUD AND THE COUNCIL

  The next day, before they bring her before the Council, Dunyazad comes to see her in her cell, a tiny cube-shaped room, where the air is hot and thick with Repentants. Before Duny enters, she stands at the door and watches her for a long time. She is formally dressed in a Gomelez muhtasib robe, dark cloth embroidered with Secret Names. But to Tawaddud’s surprise, she is not wearing her qarin jinn jar around her neck.

  ‘Do you know why I became a muhtasib?’ Duny says.

  Tawaddud says nothing.

  ‘Because I wanted to protect you from this.’ Duny speaks a Secret Name, and then Tawaddud is in her sister’s head.

  She watches the city from her tower. This is the first duty of the muhtasib, always: the other Sirr where the jinni live, watching the flow of Seals and sobors, listening to the pulse and the breath of the city in the athar. Nieve is there with her, of course, painting the night city for her stroke by stroke, whispering to Repentants who bring her information, racing along wires and patches of athar untainted by wildcode, to show Duny the shadow of reality.

  After a night spent in the tower she always feels like the Other City is the real city: this is where she adjusts things, reaching into its virtual image, touching a node, feeling it in her grasp, between the fingers of Duny/Nieve, embodied both in the shadow and the flesh.

  She thinks about Tawaddud and her love of monsters, of things she does not understand, wonders if her sister understands the monstrosity of the muhtasib and their dual nature. One part rooted in the brain, the self-loop that remembers the games she played with her sister up on the Wall, and the Nieve part, the part she carries in the bottle around her neck, the soul that races through the night and yearns for a body.

  Her father gave her to the entwiner when she was seven. Too old, the man said, stroking his beard. Why now? It will never take root.

  Her father’s hands rested heavily on the man’s shoulders, jinn rings pressing into the flesh of his neck. She is a Gomelez, her father said. She must have a qarin. His voice had a trace of anger that echoed with the fights he had had with her mother. Duny would sneak in to listen when they fought, using the words Chaeremon had taught to make her silent. Tawaddud slept all the way through it, always.

  A few more months, her mother said that night. I cannot let them go yet.

  It is time, her father said. It is already too late. He paused. Perhaps one would be enough. Can you choose?

  How can I choose?

  Foolish woman. The qarin is not a thing of evil. It is a sign of glory, of power, a new soul. It gives you strength to serve the city.

  But there is more to it, her mother said. It changes you, they say. I have seen you with Chaeremon. You become different.

  I’ll do it, Dunyazad said.

  Her parents looked at her.

  My mouse, my flower, you do not know what you are saying, her mother said. You should go back to bed. Mother and Father are talking.

  I heard what you said. I want to do it.

  Her father looked at her seriously, with dark eyes that he got when thinking deeply. Then maybe the decision is made for us, he said.

  Nieve the jinn comes back to her like a touch of the chill, and she is again a different being, the one who feels the ragged fragments of wildcode in the athar, a mind extended into the foglets of the air, the cool shell of the Seal in her own cells. She is not just Dunyazad the child, but a cloud of fireflies around her, and the memory feels foolish, suddenly. This is where she belongs, this is why her father brought them together, this is why the entwiner made her temples burn with the helmet on her head, made her dream of Nieve, made Nieve dream of Dunyazad.

  How did she ever doubt that it was right?

  ‘It is not always right,’ Dunyazad
says. She holds her jinn jar in her hand.

  ‘I never knew,’ Tawaddud says slowly. ‘Why tell me now?’

  ‘Because they are going to throw you off the top of the Shard and Father is going to go along with it, to get his precious vote through. Even when there are alternatives.’

  ‘The zoku,’ Tawaddud says.

  ‘Yes. I can see you have been talking to Sumanguru, or whatever his name really is.’

  ‘Why them?’

  ‘Because I don’t like who I am with Nieve. It wasn’t like with your Axolotl. We are all monsters, Tawaddud, us muhtasibs. They graft us and jinni together and make new beings and do not care what it does to us. I want to find a different way. I hoped you would understand, that I could get you out of your shell, to help me. Instead, you embraced the madness of your Axolotl and became a killer.’

  Tawaddud shakes her head. ‘It’s not like that.’ She tells her sister the story of Sumanguru, and Abu Nuwas, and what they discovered. Duny listens carefully.

  ‘So, if Abu Nuwas reaches the jannah, none of it matters anymore,’ Tawaddud says. ‘The hsien-ku will stop playing nice. It will be a Cry of Wrath times ten. And this time, they will win.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Duny says. ‘You are a beautiful liar, but you have never been able to lie to me.’

  ‘So, what are we going to do?’

  ‘This could play in our favour. This could give me the leverage to propose an alliance with Supra City, to get a zoku embassy established here. But we need proof. Otherwise, they will never believe us. Nuwas is far too influential. Is there any way to link him to the murders?’

  ‘The Axolotl did not know how it was done. He gave Nuwas his story, and then he woke up in Alile’s mind. No one would listen to him anyway.’ Tawaddud squeezes her temples. ‘I wish I could show them.’

  ‘No one would accept an entwined testimony either, not with the Axolotl involved. And it’s just too perfect, with you as the scapegoat. The black sheep of the Gomelez family who has been working with the Devil himself, to bring down Sobornost and all that it represents, because her mother died in the Cry of Wrath.’ Duny pauses. ‘The bastards could not have planned it better. But it’s not all lost. I can get you out of here. I have contacts—’

  ‘I need to try, Duny. I need to testify.’

  ‘All right,’ she says and embraces her, long and hard. ‘I will be there, too. I will speak for you. Perhaps it will be enough.’

  The Great Observatory sits on top of the Blue Shard, above its waterfalls and palaces and muhtasib buildings with their azure walls. It is a lenticular structure held aloft by arches that rise from the top of the Shard and bow towards the city. Tawaddud has never been there. The carpet guides Tawaddud, Duny and their Repentant guards to a modest entrance on the building’s upper surface.

  The Observatory galleries are a historical relic, large spherical spaces, with pentagonal windows, and a circular balcony bisecting them. Secret Names are engraved in gold on every surface. Mosaics guide the eye to the observation windows. The harnesses where the muhtasib used to sit with their glasses and athar telescopes are still here, but now only wooden life-sized dolls are suspended from them.

  The Councillors wait for them in front of the large pentagonal windows that open to the wildcode desert, a jagged landscape of fallen Sobornost technology, now overgrown with windmill trees and nameless plants, chaotic geometry broken only by the rails of soul trains, heading towards the mountains in the north.

  There are six of them. Cassar’s face is like stone. He is flanked by Lucius Aguilar, his old supporter, dour and thin-faced. A jinn thought-form hovers around a plain Council jinn jar. Mr Sen. House Soarez is represented by a short-haired woman, Councilwoman Idris. Ayman Ugarte, a powerful man whose face is covered in Seal tattoos, gives Tawaddud a hard stare.

  And then there is Veyraz, Veyraz ibn’ Ad, of House Uzeda. Her husband. When he sees Tawaddud, his eyes widen. He gives her a look that she has been dreading for four years, full of hate and jealousy. Duny takes her place next to their father, who nods at Tawaddud and then wrenches himself up from his chair laboriously, spreading his arms.

  ‘We have been chosen by the Council to question you, Tawaddud Gomelez. You are accused of assisting the jinn Zaybak, also known as the Axolotl, in the murders of Councilwoman Alile Soarez and the Sobornost envoy Sumanguru, of the Turquoise Branch. This is not to establish your guilt, which is already apparent to the Council, but to present the people of Sirr with a full account of your crimes before the Aun.’ His face is red. ‘Before we begin questioning, you may speak.’

  Tawaddud swallows. Her mouth is dry. No more pleasant lies, she thinks.

  ‘We are fools, all of us, all of Sirr,’ she says. ‘We are selling our blood for wealth, and think it makes us rich. But we are pale and tired and weak—’

  ‘Are you mocking the heritage of your own House, woman?’ shouts Veyraz.

  Cassar holds up his hand. ‘Let her speak.’

  ‘But she is clearly—’

  ‘Let her speak!’

  Tawaddud looks down. She feels their eyes on her. The speech she rehearsed for so long in her cell feels muddled and empty.

  ‘We cannot live without blood. We cannot survive on empty wealth, thinking we can make Sirr-in-the-sky live again. There is another power in the sky now, and its thirst will never be quenched.

  ‘I am not guilty of the crimes I am accused of. But there are things this council needs to hear, and I will leap from the Shard and embrace the desert, if that will make you listen.’

  Her father looks at her, with a strange look of anguish on his face. Suddenly, Tawaddud remembers where she saw that expression. They were cooking together, on one of the long quiet evenings after her mother died. Instead of following the recipe, she put in a liberal mixture of spices, cumin and marjoram, because it felt right.

  ‘That is what you need to get food to do, to tell a story,’ Cassar said. ‘Even if you need to use a few forbidden spices.’

  Duny is looking at her too. For a moment, Tawaddud remembers what the city looked like through her eyes, a muhtasib’s eyes.

  To tell a story. The circle and the square. No wonder it seemed so familiar.

  ‘He used the city,’ she whispers. She looks at the Council. ‘I can prove that Abu Nuwas the gogol merchant conspired to murder Alile Soarez.’

  It takes a lot of chaos and confusion and jinni dashing through the Observatory, but eventually, they all watch Sirr on a large athar screen. The circle and the square are there, in the dance of the nodes, in the flow of sobors and Seals, the whole economy of the city telling a children’s tale for those with the eyes to see.

  Idris Soarez exhales.

  ‘The amount of capital needed to do this – it’s staggering. Embedding a body thief’s story in the financial system of the city, to be seen by only one muhtasib in a single sector – madness.’

  ‘Effective madness,’ Duny says. ‘Everything my sister says is true. The foundation our city is built upon is crumbling. The age of gogol trade is over.’

  ‘I still think there is room to discuss this openly with Sobornost,’ Lucius Aguilar says. ‘Get them to admit that they have openly dealt with and corrupted a muhtasib, that—’

  ‘What Councilman Aguilar does not appreciate is that we have not really been dealing with Sobornost,’ Duny says. ‘We are dealing with an eccentric aunt in the Sobornost family. The full might of Sobornost turned against us will mean our end, and when they come, it will be over in hours, if not in minutes.’

  ‘The first and only thing we have to do is to stop Abu Nuwas from getting to that jannah,’ Tawaddud says. ‘He has a mercenary army in the desert, on its way there.’

  Mr Sen’s thought-form, a flame-bird, wavers. ‘It does look like the Nuwas family has spent great amounts of sobors essentially hiring all the mercenaries they could get their hands on. It is not possible to mobilise a similar force at such short notice.’

  Visions of what the Axolotl
showed her in the Palace of Stories flash in Tawaddud’s mind. Rivers of thought, castles made of stories. The eyes of a girl in a dirty dress, burning like embers.

  ‘Sirr does not need an army,’ Tawaddud says, turning to her father. ‘We have the desert. Father, it is time to speak to the Aun.’

  26

  MIELI AND THE LOST JANNAH

  A part of Mieli watches Abu Nuwas stand in the prow of Nakir and speak strange words. Below, the wildcode desert smiles and moves in response. It reminds her of the Lakshmi plain on Venus, huge things moving beneath Earth’s crust.

  ‘My lords,’ Nuwas says, ‘ladies. I give you the Lost Jannah of the Cannon.’

  But another part of her is in the pellegrini’s temple.

  ‘Mieli,’ says the goddess, smiling. There are stars in her auburn hair. ‘It looks like you have failed in yet another task.’

  ‘I have not failed yet,’ Mieli says. ‘It is just that I need to become something else to accomplish it.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘An army,’ Mieli says.

  In the other place, outside her head, a city is rising from the dust. A storm boils beneath the mercenary fleet. The wildcode desert recognises the Secret Name Abu Nuwas has spoken. Blue-tinted towers, palisades and walls rise from the spiral of white chaos. A hot wind comes, waste heat vented by the desert nanomachines. It makes the air boil and twist. The rukh ships struggle to stay still. Muhtasibs strain their wills to control the chimera creatures. Below, streets and buildings appear, angular letters written by a vast pen.

  In a temple, far away, a goddess starts laughing.

  ‘What are you asking, little one? How would I even grant your request?’

  ‘I know you have inserted yourself into the Gourd systems. All that hardware above Earth. Use it.’

  ‘And reveal myself to the hsien-kus?’

  ‘The hsien-kus and vasilevs are going to come after you anyway. If they get the chen gogol, they are going to blackmail your lord and master to stay out of their way.’

  ‘An interesting theory,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Of course, it has one flaw: no one blackmails Matjek Chen.’ She touches her lips, suddenly. ‘Although. . . you have just given me an idea.’