Kaikobad stood on the seawall, staring out into the ocean. There were many others with him, watching. The city behind him was broken. The walls still held, her defenders still defended, but something vital had gone out: the sense of invincibility, perhaps; the insouciance that had characterized her lowliest denizen.
Six times, Kuriken had driven off the invading armies, scattering them, destroying their princes, taking the war across the world, to Kemet and Babylon, to high Lhasa and the plains of Harappa, everywhere djinn revolted, poisoned by Horus, who never fought, but whispered and cajoled, bringing madness in his wake. Kuriken had scorched the earth with his power, had extinguished tribes and ground to dirt nascent cities, yet nothing changed.
Six times, Memmion had returned, raising armies from god knows where, lately even raising the dead, animating them with power and hurling them like offal at the walls. Gangaridai had lost. The city might hold, might rule this land forever, but her dominion over the world was finished. The City of Peace was lost, the innocence and promise of the First Empire was gone, and with it came a peculiar sadness, as if a path had been shown and rejected: the djinn had chosen discord instead, had opted for violence, chaos, and random chance. For a brief period something wondrous had existed, but it was not the djinn way to bend the knee, to accept any master over their own desires. Peace was not to their taste. They had taught the world war, they had armed humans and Nephilim, and now there was no end to it.
The word of the day was Bahamut. Bahamut, the Marid of the Sea, was in open revolt, and every swell in the bay made the watchers flinch, as if he would emerge any minute and swallow them whole. No one knew what had turned him, this normally peaceable djinn who had slept for centuries. Ancient treaties of goodwill were broken. The lords of the First City had sailed ceaselessly into the deep, sending ambassadors, offerings, pleadings for parley. Bahamut answered only with rising waves.
There had been tremors underwater for many months now, small earthquakes that sent tidal waves up over the seawall, rattling the ships in the harbor. Bahamut was causing the earthquakes, testing some fell device. It was said that Bahamut taunted them, penned their great fleet in the slips, particularly galling as Gangaridai had been a maritime power, a far-flung network of trade routes, before the Marid of the Sea had turned against her. Ship captains despaired. Today, one old man, a famous navigator, had hanged himself from his top mast, unable to accept a landlocked world where he could no longer venture into the bay.
The Horologists still inhabited the basement of the King’s Tower. The miasma of their sorcery had spread over more parts of the city. Food no longer rotted. Flowers bloomed for days, lending unearthly color and aching beauty to the scorched walls. Kaikobad could sense the uneasiness of the people as clocks stopped ticking, as confusion reigned over day and night, as hunger and thirst drew down, the urges of life fading, until they were like ghosts, going through the motions. Many fell into traps of repetition, playing the same game of chess over and over again, watching the same plume of smoke circling from mouth to hookah and back again, over the looping gurgle of water. The High King had unleashed some madness, some seductive alteration to the world, stealing upon them in their sleep, imperceptibly enough that they no longer recalled when it had first happened.
Kaikobad, drawn into the tale of the First City, now felt a gnawing despair. He battled to warn them, to tell them to flee, but the gate gave only memories. Perhaps somewhere there was another gate that would let him reach out and touch the skin of the world, but he did not know where, and it did not come to him, despite his prayers. Thoth consoled him in these moments. He had searched for the road himself, for as long as duration had no meaning. The road would take them back if only they could find it, the Charnel Road, the Bone Road—was blood and bone not the very essence of life?
When the watchers of the sea grew tired, they wandered off, and the waves got slightly higher every night, until they touched the lip of the wall and then regularly slipped over, creating a shallow marsh in the low end of the city, a flood at high tide that they had never seen. Unnerved, they barricaded the wall with their belongings, priceless furnishings tossed against the encroaching water, which moved like Bahamut’s will, endlessly dripping, slow, inexorable.
Day after day, nothing happened, but the city drowned. The troubadours sang dirges. Wine was the order of the day, drunk in sorrow on the street corners, for they could all see that Bahamut would never come in cataclysmic fury. He didn’t need to. He would kill them inch by inch, torture them with this slow, ceaseless deluge, and what army was there that could fight this? Young djinn and Nephilim played a game: they stood on the seawall with their field, holding back the water, reversing the tide, and it was a beautiful, noble futility, for their shield would hold for days, for weeks, until a single chink of exhaustion, a small faltering, would let in a drop, a trickle, and the strain would shatter everything, and they would have to start again, the water lapping at their feet half an inch higher. They faced their doom with smiles, with youthful bravado, as if there were nothing to lose.
“We will not fall,” they said to one another, when the sun set and the campfires of Memmion’s army in the burning fields grew oppressive. “The city cannot fall as long as we hold the walls. What does it matter if Bahamut sends the tides? We will be a city of boats.”
Kaikobad wept for them, their lost innocence, and he wept for Indelbed, whom he could not see at all.