“This is all happening very hastily,” GU Sikkim said, as he pulled on his hookah. Some of the younger children of the family had banded together and bought it for him. They called it shisha, like the damn Arabs. And they had the cheek to give him some awful apple-flavored stuff instead of real, manly tobacco.
His guest was the djinn Matteras, who affected the human form of a stocky, bald psychopath. His teeth, when he smiled, were two rows of needle fangs. GU Sikkim thought that this pretty much summed up his entire personality.
They were sitting on the roof of GU Sikkim’s Baridhara duplex. He owned this part of the roof outright and had girded it with latticed walls and various plants to maintain privacy. It felt like a garden. The open air was good for him. It was also easier to entertain guests like Matteras. The space around the djinn glittered, as if agitated somehow. Each djinn had a distortion field around him, a sort of spherical area of influence where quantum distortions occurred.
Matteras had an exceptionally powerful distortion field. He could flatten a building a hundred yards away. Right now, out of consideration for his host, he had compacted his field into a ball a few yards in diameter. Sitting inside the djinn’s distortion field made GU Sikkim sick. He got vertigo and heard noises. His teeth hurt. His heart felt like flopping out of his chest. On a good day, more than a minute would make him puke. Thus, Matteras sat at the opposite end of the roof, keeping a polite distance. This was a sign of extraordinary consideration on the part of the djinn, who, like most of his race, was overbearingly arrogant.
“Sikkim, times are changing,” Matteras said. “You were told to control the emissary Kaikobad and his son. In this you failed.”
“Control that madman?” GU Sikkim shuddered. “I kept him pickled in alcohol.”
“It was not enough,” Matteras said. “He put the mark of Bahamut on the boy, and then he applied for permission to enter him as an apprentice. This created many ripples, I can tell you.”
“He’s a runty half-wit, that boy,” GU Sikkim said. “And Kaikobad is in a coma. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“It has become political,” Matteras said. To djinn this was a catchall phrase for matters far too complex for humans to understand. Djinn politics was notoriously convoluted. Nor were the rewards tangible or, often enough, even predictable. Huge amounts of auctoritas were used on ridiculous gambles with obscure payoffs. Alliances between individuals shifted like sand. No djinn trusted another. It was the Great Game. “I know about Kaikobad. Forget him, he’s never waking up. The boy concerns me. You will deal with him.”
“You want me to help you kill my own grand-nephew?” GU Sikkim asked. He should have felt more outrage at the thought, but in reality, he was just irritated that the unwelcome whelp was still causing him trouble.
“I shall not kill him, I’m not barbaric,” Matteras said. “He must be removed from the board nonetheless. You should have kept him in obscurity, as I asked. You always knew this day would come.” He waved his hand around the rooftop garden. “You have certainly enjoyed the fruits of my favor. Do not act squeamish now.”
“Obscurity? I kept the boy damn near locked in his house for the past ten years. He didn’t even know his mother was a djinn.”
“Regardless, it is now open news that my sister had a son,” Matteras said. “There is no saving him now. It is his very blood that is the problem. My enemies would love to parade him around like a dog on a leash. My position is untenable. Forget the boy. You had better concentrate on preserving the rest of your clan… and all your wealth.”
GU Sikkim had, in the past, entered into a bargain with Matteras. Over two decades ago, at the supposed peak of his business career, he had in fact lost a lot of money. Led astray by an old friend, he had sunk his capital into a factory devoted to making skin-whitening products for men. Due to some faulty advertising and unfortunate chemical reactions, they were deluged with lawsuits from irate customers suffering severe disfigurement. The whitening product, far from creating a milky complexion, had turned certain victims a deep orange. More than two dozen prospective grooms had used this product, only to find their faces literally sloughing off on the eve of their weddings. The hoopla was enormous, with media coverage, court cases, and mob action outside the factory.
His partner ran away to Nairobi, leaving him with a mountain of trade debt and bank loans for which he was jointly and severally liable. The Standard & Bartered Bank had his personal guarantee, which meant all of his properties, including the Baridhara duplex, were up for grabs. Worst of all, the government initiated an investigation against him, with alarming talk of criminal charges.
None of his banker friends came forward to help him. His lawyers advised him to let the cases hang in court for the next fifty years and then charged him outrageous fees. His friend, the editor of the Daily Star, informed him with mock sadness that he just hadn’t been able to stop his rabid journalists from covering the story. The family offered gratuitous advice with ill-hidden glee. They would have stopped him from going to jail, but he would have lost everything! He would have been a shirttail relative like Kaikobad, living in squalor. Intolerable!
And then, like Faustus’s demon, Matteras arrived. He offered immediate relief. The chief victim was defenestrated. Others rescinded. The defaced orange bridegrooms were married off. Opposing lawyers withdrew their cases. The bank directors, so snooty only days ago, suddenly became sweet, offering extensions and reschedulements. His local branch once again started sending him diaries and calendars and wishing him happy birthday.
Funds appeared in Sikkim’s accounts, wired in from the Caymans. Best of all, the Directorate General of Drug Administration, hitherto investigating him with unnecessary zeal, was suddenly blessed with a dream from the angel Gabriel, who expressly declared Sikkim innocent of any malpractice. He closed the investigation the very next day and sent Sikkim a handsome letter of apology along with a box of iffy sweets. The related files subsequently disappeared from the archives, leaving no trace of the initial findings.
All in all, Matteras had delivered. In return GU Sikkim signed a 743-page contract; the djinn being an extremely litigious race, their contracts were so intricate that not even Sikkim’s handpicked team of five barristers had been able to make heads or tails of it. His main man, Barrister Asif, had finally shrugged and advised him to just sign. What difference would it really make? (Barrister Asif had then charged him a hefty fee for this extremely cogent legal opinion.) In the end he had signed what Matteras had assured him was a simple client contract, making Matteras his legal patron.
In djinn culture the patronage system was a long-cherished tradition where patrons offered the weight of their auctoritas as protection and guidance to their clients, who in turn supported their patron in myriad capacities. It was a binding legal obligation, going both ways. In reality, as far as Sikkim could determine, it meant that he had to do whatever Matteras said, on pain of falling foul of djinn law. On top of that, Matteras looked like he could literally bite a man’s head off, and it was simply out of the question to disobey him.
“Now, because of some overreaching political debates between various djinn societies—mainly my own faction and that of Bahamut—this has become a sensitive issue. I do not want a huge hue and cry about this,” Matteras said.
“Well, you shouldn’t have called the hunt on him then,” GU Sikkim said.
“I did no such thing,” Matteras said. “The minor hunt was called by my enemies to draw attention to him. They wished to embarrass me. Then the Evolutionist faction latched on to it, trying to claim djinn status for the boy. The minor hunt has been declared legal, but it is tied up in protests, injunctions, and countersuits. It has reached a point where it might even incur negative dignatas on the one who completes the hunt. A most piquant situation.”
“What do you want from me then?” GU Sikkim waved his hand irritably.
“I want to apprehend the boy quietly,” Matteras said. “I want him to disappear, not paraded in front of the courts as some trophy of a hunt. And I want everyone involved to forget about it. Who do you have with him now?”
“I’ve sent the Ambassador,” GU Sikkim said. “He’s mostly up to speed on things. He’ll deliver the boy to you, no problem.”
“I can tell from your fatuous expression that there is a problem.”
“Kaikobad contacted an emissary colleague for help,” GU Sikkim said. “I tried to stall him, but he’s actually here now, in Wari, living at the house. Some creature called Siyer Dargo Dargoman.”
Matteras uttered a string of djinn curse words. The air shimmered around him with flits of locust lights. GU Sikkim fell back in alarm. It was all too easy to forget the lethal force these ancient creatures commanded, especially while drinking tea on the roof garden.
“I couldn’t stop it,” GU Sikkim said feebly.
“You are utterly useless,” Matteras said. “The emissary knows djinns, you fool. He can publicize this thing. I will have to neutralize him.”
“Kill him?” GU Sikkim was starting to get a sick feeling about this.
“Emissaries cannot be killed so easily,” Matteras said. “Not even an Ifrit of great nobility and tremendous dignatas such as myself can flout the Lore. You infantile humans naturally cannot understand concepts such as the Lore, but suffice it to say that it is the full sum of djinn wisdom and tradition; for a djinn to be caught transgressing would cause a great deal of censure. I would lose dignatas.”
“Yes, patron,” GU Sikkim said.
“I cannot deal with the boy in Wari. His house is well known to djinns interested in the hunt. It is protected by ancient runes, moreover. You must get the boy and Siyer away to a secluded spot. When they are alone I will deal with them both.”
“I will tell the Ambassador to get them out of there,” GU Sikkim said. “I cannot control where Siyer will go, however—”
“Do you still have that little apartment in Mirpur, where you kept your mistress?” Matteras asked, without blinking.
“Er, yes.”
“I trust the mistress is gone?”
“Yes, I mean that was just a one-time thing…”
“Spare me, you cretin,” Matteras said. “Is it empty now?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then send Siyer and the boy over there. Make up whatever story you like.”
“And then what?”
“Once I have the boy, it will all be over. Forget about it.”