The submarine, it turned out, was perfect for hot-boxing. By dusk, they were cruising with the top down on the Meghna River. Boatmen greeted them hesitantly, puzzled by the open porthole with the two heads bobbing out. They didn’t care because they were high and everything seemed particularly amusing, even the dead cow carcass that floated past and nearly collided with them. The wind was rushing past their faces, birds were flying overhead, and the bottle of whiskey they were passing back and forth was still half full. It was as good as it was going to get.
“You know what I’ve realized?” Rais said with all the profundity of the completely stoned. “I’m not cut out for this.”
“Right, right, you’re a terrible captain,” Barabas said. “I mean the river is a mile wide and you keep bumping into corpses.”
“Not that.”
“Oh yes, you’re also a terrible emissary,” Barabas said. “I mean it’s Emissary 101 that you’re not supposed to flaunt this djinn stuff to the general public. But here you are, cruising down the river in a submarine for every villager to gawk at.”
“No, no, I meant the bigger thing. The meta-thing.”
“You’re even worse at explaining things then.”
“This whole heroic poseur thing,” Rais said. “I mean I’m basically a lazy coward.”
“Kaikobad was quite heroic,” Barabas said with sudden glumness.
“He was a drunk, I thought.”
“He was. But he was like a glamorous dark stranger.” Barabas belched. “You’re a drunk too, so at least you got that part right.”
“What I’m saying is that I don’t want to really do this fighting quest stuff.”
“What? You can’t just quit.”
“Well, I want to be paid,” Rais said, with the doggedness of the drunk.
“Paid?”
“Not with this dignatas crap. I’m not falling for that fakery,” Rais said. “I want material goods. Gold, dollars, pounds.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous. Kaikobad never even dreamed of such a thing. It’s an insult.”
“Look, Barabas, I’m tired of being poor, living in a shithole, driving a piece of shit, going out to only shit places with you and then picking up the tab. How is it you’ve lived this long and not earned a damn cent?”
“I thought we were going to the cool, hidden-gem-type places,” Barabas said, hurt.
“No, Barabas,” Rais said. “We’ve been going to pox-infested dives. The only reason you haven’t died of syphilis yet is because the fumes from the bathtub liquor you drink kill any germs within a five-meter proxitity. Proxicity. Whatever, you get the idea.”
“So Ekram isn’t a cool bohemian-artist guy?”
“He’s a political cadre and a pimp who’s illegally occupying housing in the university. So no, he’s not a cool guy. And he’s at least forty-five years old.”
“And his sister isn’t a student of human nature?”
“She’s not his sister, no, and I’d say she’s a hooker.”
“No!”
“Why do I say that? Because, Barabas, she’s presented me with an itemized monthly bill, which she expects me to clear.”
“Kaikobad was a real shit, wasn’t he?”
“What, for making you dress like a mullah, drink poisonous liquor, sleep with disease-ridden one-legged hookers, and hang out with the lowest underclass of criminals in the city? Maybe you should pay your emissaries.”
“All right, all right, I can see you’ve worked yourself up a little bit.” Barabas finished the bottle and sent it spinning into the darkness. It bounced off a dead dog and came right back. “Kaiko and I had a lot of good times. I suppose you can do better, eh, Mr. High and Mighty?”
“Considering that even the drug dealers in the fourth-class workers colony are a better society of people than you’re used to, yes,” Rais said. “I declare, I can do better.”
“All right, we’ll go and hang with your uptight asshole friends then.”
“Well, I’d take you, but… I’m actually so fucking broke that I no longer leave the house. And by house I mean the barely habitable dump in Mirpur.”
“Hmm, why don’t you move into Kaikobad’s house? That’s a bit of a mansion, eh?”
“What?!”
“He told me it was the best area in the city!” Barabas said, aggrieved.
“It was like thirty years ago.”
“You know what’s really irritating? The way you humans keep changing things around.”
“Anyway, that place is a dump of epic proportions.”
“Dump? The house is magnificent! I built parts of it myself. There are treasures there beyond human understanding!”
“What? It’s full of random junk!”
“Ha! Junk indeed. Let me tell you, there are some pretty amazing things there.”
“Barabas, are you trying to sell me my uncle’s old crap as wages?”
“You’ll see, my little friend,” Barabas said. “Kaikobad didn’t collect paper money, true. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a shrewd operator.”
“So people keep saying,” Rais snorted, unconvinced.
The next day, tormented by the stabbing toxic brain rot that only the cheapest alcohol could achieve, they made their way over to Wari. The house had been boarded up, and as Rais forced the front door open, he found the interior even more derelict than usual. He remembered that day many years ago, his mother cleaning up the place to receive the emissary Dargoman and Indelbed cheerfully packing, perfectly willing to leave with a stranger, and he felt a pang of regret. For all their progress, they had achieved nothing on that front.
“This place is full of wards!” Barabas said, looking around.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Djinn constructs. Spells, you can say,” Barabas said. “Protection.”
“Fat lot of good it did my uncle.”
“It’s puzzling,” Barabas said. “It would take a very high-level djinn to get Kaikobad in his own home.”
“Matteras.”
“Yes, but why would he bother? What was so important?”
“Perhaps he was pissed off with Uncle getting with his sister.”
“Perhaps. Ah, this is what I was looking for. Take this. I told you there was valuable loot here.”
Rais received the item and squinted at it in the dim light. It seemed like a pair of crude, rimless glasses, a simple steel frame affixed to thick circular blue lenses.
“Put it on,” Barabas said.
He did, and the world suddenly bloomed into a latticework of smudged black lines, a mad Archimedean landscape twisting his vision into a Möbius strip, complex geometry shimmering in each available space, hanging menace like clockwork spiders.
“Now you see what we see,” Barabas said smugly.
“Whoa. I’m tripping. What are these, like spells?”
“Crafters among us can use the distortion field to make stable structures of dark energy. These can be tied off and triggered by anyone, even complete humans. Kaikobad had a very faint power; he could sense the field and see the constructs, in a fashion—better with those glasses.”
“Did he make all these spells?” The glasses were making his head spin.
“He could only do the simple stuff after he started drinking, but these wards are higher order. I made some of them. The larger ones were made by master craftsmen who owed him favors. I told you he was rich.”
Rais was looking at Barabas, seeing for the first time the nebula of energy rippling around his corporeal form whenever he flexed his field. The djinn looked a lot less comical now.
“These glasses are pretty cool.”
“They’re a priceless artifact.”
“Could I use spells?”
“Yes, anyone can, if you know the trigger words.”
“And you can make spells?”
“Not very good ones. I’m not a master craftsman or anything.”
“Couldn’t you spell up a pile of cash?”
“No. Something cannot be created out of nothing. And before you ask me, the ancient alchemists can change things to gold, but I’m not one of them and they don’t go around sharing stuff like that.”
“Right. So there are djinns who can do a whole bunch of cool shit, but you aren’t one of them, is that the gist of it?”
“I’m taking the glasses back.”
“Okay, okay, sorry, jeez, way to be oversensitive.”
“Come on, let’s find some more goodies.”
They worked well into the night, fueled by copious amounts of cigarettes and kebabs from the corner shop. Kaikobad had been an odd creature. The most useless junk, not even worth thieving, turned out to be ensorcelled, sometimes baffling even the djinn. There were many things that emanated power stashed carelessly all over the place.
“I’m done,” Rais said finally, near dawn. “I can’t see anymore. My eyes are killing me.”
“Right, I should probably have warned you, those are experimental,” Barabas said. “One of a kind. Me and Kaiko made them. We have a patent pending for it.”
“And?”
“Well, prolonged use might burn out your occipital lobe. Kept happening to the monkeys we tried them on.”
“Great. What’s this pile of stuff?”
“Oh, bits and pieces I’m thinking of reclaiming.”
“Are you looting my uncle’s house?”
“Nonsense, these are all things I had loaned him at one time or another.”
“What does this pipe do?”
“Hrmm, it’s the Never-Ending Pipe. Very valuable artifact.”
“The what?”
“It makes a little quantum tunnel to the nearest smoking instrument and diverts it here,” Barabas said.
“Are you serious?”
“You can’t imagine the kind of weird shit you humans smoke. Kaiko once got a lungful of cow dung,” Barabas said. “And it came from the most harmless-looking old grandmother…”
“Okay, I’m definitely keeping that.”
“Now listen here—”
“Barabas, everything here is clearly Uncle Kaikobad’s property, and you’ve already stated that you intend to remunerate me with objects from this house, so I don’t think you have a leg to stand on.”
“That’s cheeky, coming from a fool who didn’t even know what any of this stuff was.”
“Do you want me to call my mother?”
“No, no, leave her out of it.”
“That’s right.”
The next morning, they packed their bags, had coffee at Gloria Jeans with the last of Rais’s monthly allowance (which was a beggarly amount given grudgingly by his father), smoked the grit out of their lungs with some tokes from the Never-Ending Pipe, and started off to find the reclusive djinn Risal.
“Last I heard, she was living in the clouds,” Barabas said.
“Like literally?”
“Yes, we need an airship.”
“I don’t suppose Kaikobad had one lying around?” Rais asked hopefully.
“No, the airship club doesn’t like unauthorized vehicles,” Barabas said. “We try to keep a low profile. Don’t want all your military folk getting uptight. And god forbid if Google gets wind of us.”
“So do we just take a regular airline? What do you mean in the clouds exactly?”
“Don’t worry. I know one housed in the old airport. Follow me.”
They wandered into the old airport without anyone really stopping them, although it was purportedly under the control of the Bangladesh Air Force. Barabas had some bogus civil aviation badge, which he flashed around unnecessarily a couple of times. Eventually they made their way to a dark, abandoned-looking hangar, which had a couple of forlorn Fokker death traps lined up under patchwork tarps, pools of ancient oil staining the ground.
“I’m not going on those,” Rais said, grabbing Barabas’s arm.
The djinn whistled a couple of times, and from the back another disreputable-looking character sauntered out. Rais snapped on his blue glasses and saw the same telltale distortion field coming off him.
“Emissary-in-training Rais, meet the djinn Golgoras, captain of the airship Sephiroth, destroyer class.”
“What do you want?”
Golgoras looked like a pirate. He had one normal eye. The other one had a brass telescopic eyepiece grafted on to the bone. He had four-inch walrus tusks growing out of his lower jaw. His hands were giant anvils of bone and gristle with a curved black talon on the end of each finger. He seemed ready to bite.
“He’s an exotic,” Barabas said, tapping his teeth. “Bit crazy, all the ones up there.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Captain,” Rais said. “The renown of the airship Sephiroth precedes you.”
“Humph. Of course it does.” He did appear mollified, however.
“We need a ride up. Orders from Himself,” Barabas said.
“That oceanic bastard can go stuff himself,” Golgoras said. “I ain’t one of his damn clients, to be ordered about—”
“Remember ’59?” Barabas said.
“Humph, fine. You using Bahamut’s auctoritas?”
“My own is sufficient, I believe!” Barabas said.
Golgoras gave him a look intimating that no such thing was the case. “Where do you want to go? The Hub?”
“No. We need to find Risal. She lives in a sky house up in the remote quadrant. I have some last known coordinates.”
“These are twenty years old, you fool!”
“She can’t have gone far. It’s a floater, not a damn rocket ship.”
“All right, come then. Going to the Hub anyways. If this takes more than three days, it’s on the big man’s account.”
The Sephiroth, actually, was quite enormous and sitting in perfectly plain view. The upper envelope was a torpedo-shaped blimp, rather predatory in a rakish sort of way, shark teeth designs running up the sides, the fabric something shimmery, lovingly etched with djinn-powered runes invisible to the naked eye. The ship part was a low-slung aluminum canister with complex wooden spars and rigging, complete with steering fins on either side, a couple of ship rotors at the end, and exhaust flues angling up from some kind of steam or combustion engine. The thing had an actual battering ram attached to the front in the shape of a gargoyle’s fist. Moreover, there seemed to be cannons mounted on swivels at strategic intervals. Rais’s estimation of the captain went up considerably; he really was a pirate.
“We have stealth tech, for when we’re up there,” Golgoras said as they boarded. “The Humes think we’re a weather balloon.”
“So, done any piracy lately?” Rais asked casually.
Golgoras glared at him. “No such thing as piracy up here.”
“Awful lot of guns then.”
Golgoras telescoped his eye threateningly, and Rais shut up.
The central control cabin was indeed crammed with peculiar-looking weapons, crates of contraband items, and nothing much in the way of furniture. The instrumentation was lovingly done in brass, in much the same fashion as the submarine, in what was possibly a signature style for djinn.
“Passenger cabins that way.” Golgoras pointed to a narrow passage behind a reinforced wooden door. “Stay off the gun decks, stay out of the engine room. I have three crew members, they’re my vassals, and they are under pain of death not to speak, so do not bother talking to them. Meals will be served in your rooms.”
“Easy now,” Barabas said. “You’ve become antisocial, wandering around all alone.”
“In case of emergency, I’m throwing both of you overboard,” Golgoras said. “Now clear off, I’m going to get airborne.”
“Oh, we’d like to watch,” Barabas said hopefully.
“The cockpit is off-limits to civilians,” Golgoras said rudely. “At all times. Now move it.”
They repaired to the cabins, which were little more than cramped alcoves with hammocks tied at intervals, creating a bunk bed effect. There were portholes at eye level, however, and once they were settled in things did not seem so bad.
“Bit tight,” Rais said. “Beautiful ship, though. Your captain friend is a bit grumpy.”
“The Sephiroth is famous,” Barabas said, scowling. “Golgoras has gotten very high and mighty ever since he got it. How did he get it, you ask? Very dark deeds, I wouldn’t be surprised. He says he won it in a race, but I don’t know. He’s become paranoid too. Doesn’t want us around the cockpit snooping on his air charts and instrumentation. All these captains are so uppity. You’d think he’d let us watch from the wheelhouse.”
“I’m happy hanging over here. You want a drink?”
“He’s pretty low on crew. Just those three half-wit Ghuls.”
“Ghuls?”
“Djinn, but an inferior race,” Barabas said. “Poor fellows can hardly control their distortion fields. Not very smart either. Strong, though, and good workers—don’t mind the nasty, dangerous stuff. Golgoras must be doing quite well if he can afford to hire three of them. Still, it’s a big ship for just the four of them to manage.”
“I’m amazed no one’s noticed all these djinn flying around.”
“Why should they? Sky’s a big place, plenty of room for everyone,” Barabas said. “Plus we’ve got fantastic stealth tech. Your radars probably think we’re birds or something. Anyway, back to the point, this ship is seriously undermanned.”
“What?”
“Theoretically speaking, I bet we could overpower Golgoras and take the Sephiroth. Imagine the dignatas!”
“Are you crazy?”
“Just a hypothetical plan. Not being serious, of course,” Barabas said with relish. “We’d have to take down Golgoras by ambush and capture the cockpit. The Ghuls will be too stupid to realize what’s happening, if we get him down fast enough.”
“Yeah, sure,” Rais said.
“Good, good,” Barabas said. “First you take the Saber of Easy Cutting and strike through his distortion field. He’ll be so surprised that—”
“Um, is that my uncle’s sword?”
“Yes, of course, you did bring it, didn’t you?”
“Er, no.”
“What? Why? Why would you leave behind a one-of-a-kind magic sword particularly efficacious in fighting djinn? Why?”
“Well, it’s really heavy and sharp—”
“It’s a sword! It’s a sword! It’s supposed to be sharp!”
“Also”—Rais held up his hand—“the wires wrapping the hilt are kind of frayed and they cut my hand. See?”
“Well, at least tell me that you’ve brought the Invisible Dagger of Five Strikes.”
“Ahem. We might have misplaced that.”
“What?!”
“Well, it is invisible, and I distinctly remember putting it in my duffel bag, but…”
“So what the devil did you bring?” Barabas looked ready to cry.
“Cheer up, I’ve still got the pipe. Plus my glasses, of course. And also this bottle of whiskey from Uncle’s secret stash.”
“Is it a never-ending bottle?”
“No.” Rais took a sniff. “Not a particularly good blend either.”
“Oh, all right.” Barabas shifted in his hammock glumly. “Pass it here. It’s almost like you don’t even want to fight…”
“Well, to be honest, hand-to-hand combat isn’t really my thing.”
“Kaikobad would have waded in with that thing—”
“Yeah, yeah, Kaikobad would have stuffed Golgoras into a lamp and conquered the skies with an army of Ghuls,” Rais said. “You and me, though, we’d be Golgoras’s bitch in two minutes max.”
“Humph, if we had the sword we could have made short work of him.”
“Cheer up, let’s just enjoy the ride.”