It had been months since they had seen Memmion. The golden giant invoked atavistic fear in the First City these days. Every so often some out-watcher would claim to see him over the horizon, and the citizens would quake. There were effigies of him burning on every street corner, at the foot of every tower. The port quadrant of the city was permanently flooded now, a sloshing, stagnant marshland, the streets largely abandoned. Ships still braved the ocean, bringing food and supplies to the beleaguered empire, old trading partners maintaining alliances.
Rumors abounded, hope and despair jumbled together in manic-depressive splendor. The rebellion had ended, the enemy were scattered. Givaras the Broken was raising an army against them, the likes of which had never been seen. Memmion had made an airship and was going to attack from the skies. Kaikobad wandered the cafés lining the raised ocean promenade, now level with the sea. The patrons still came to lounge here in defiance, smoking their pipes, even though their feet got wet with every swell, and the bamboo furniture was all rotted with seawater. He knew all the regulars, had heard their stories.
Actual news from Lhasa was dire. The one true rumor was that the Ghuls had abandoned them. The djinns were not only one race, but three that Kaikobad knew of. Possibly there were more, or once had been, but as with so many things djinn, the knowledge was lost or deliberately obfuscated. The Ifrit were the most numerous, and the Marid more powerful, although it was unclear whether they were simply a type of Ifrit or a separate race altogether. The Ghuls, more numerous than the Marid, were distinct in several ways. They were physically stronger and faster, and typically held to be less intelligent, almost beastlike. It was rumored that they could not control their fields, although this was probably bigotry. They were taciturn and uncommunicative even to other djinn, and shunned contact with humans and Nephilim. The central culture of the djinn, dominated by Ifrit, treated the Ghuls as a subservient race.
Certainly, as a political unit, they were weak. They served in a largely menial capacity in the djinn world, as crew in ships, as builders, porters, and artisans, a cross between guildsmen and indentured servants, often working for food and a pittance. Gangaridai was built on Ghul labor, and they had received scant reward for all of that. Individual Ghuls did not seem to have dignatas, or at least so little that it was hardly worth acknowledging. Rather, the dignatas accrued to each Ghul tribe, of which there were many, the largest being centered in Lhasa. Their inner workings were secretive, and it was unclear to outsiders the exact hierarchy.
Over the past months, Ghuls had been leaving the city, more and more disappearing every night. This had been dismissed as the normal attrition of war: trade drying up, workers leaving for safer pastures. But now news came that Horus, named Givaras the Broken by the Ghul, had been spotted in Lhasa, that he had offered an enormous contract to the tribes of Ghul, so large that it tripled the collective dignatas of the entire race. It was unprecedented. He offered something amazing, a gesture that beggared him and at the same time enriched him beyond measure.
It was one more ally gone, a dire psychological blow for the city. The High Lords of Gangaridai, in their arrogance, had never considered that the Ghuls would take sides, that a race of servants had to be appeased and cosseted. Those few Ghuls who remained in the city were now viewed suspiciously, shunned and abused, further exacerbating the problem.
The High King was engaged in sorcery with the watchmakers. He had not yet come out of his tower, had barely left it since the first attack, not even during the last assault, when Elkran had beheaded the captain of the infantry outside the eastern gate, his rippled black sword so thin that it disappeared when viewed sideways. Elkran, undefeated in duels, equal perhaps to Kuriken himself, was lithe, his blade a whispering death. The two were destined to meet, although for now, Kuriken’s challenges went unanswered, and even he could not be in many places at once. It was the nature of Horus to direct his attacks in multiple fronts, always harrying, harassing, whittling down the far-flung outposts of the First Empire. Day by day, Kaikobad watched as the caravans and trade ships shrank, the noose tightening around the city, and the little luxuries dried up, like ice in the summertime, lemons from the north, the emeralds and rubies from Lanka that the djinns loved to etch with spells.
But the Horologists had not been idle. Perhaps it was apparent only to Kaikobad, for the citizens already lived in a kind of dream state, a fugue of semi-timelessness, but parts of the city had been disappearing, buildings winking out of sight overnight, entire streets turning to mist, then returning again, subtly altered, eerily empty. He noticed when Barkan’s tower disappeared, which had been a favorite haunt of his. It was not so much gone as inaccessible, a peculiar state of half-life, as if something could exist and still be completely removed at the same time. Then an entire corner of shops went—fruit and incense sellers, a milliner, a florist, all gone—and a kind of suspended grayness remained there, a smudge the eye flitted over, and people walked on past as if nothing had been there ever, or perhaps they saw it still, and it was Kaikobad’s eyes that were deficient.
As he followed this phenomenon, he noticed people disappearing too, ordinary folk vanishing, and it was assumed by their friends that they had just left in the night, perhaps fled to some safer place. Kaikobad, who could not sleep, saw them fade in front of his eyes, dissipating into a kind of alternate existence, or some purgatory. It was more worrying to him than the war. The magic wafting from the King’s Tower stank of something unearthly, something very old and beyond the ken of mortals. He wanted to warn them all that their lords were making deadly waves, were fundamentally betraying the world somehow, but he could find no one to listen, no djinn or man who could even see him.
Even incorporeal, he could not approach the King’s Tower. The wards there were strong enough to warp space itself, the ways to it locked by some combination he could not turn. So he watched and wandered the city as it slowly slipped away, the visions now crowding his mind with such pressure that it was impossible to differentiate one from the next, nor even to find respite in Thoth, for he could not find him or his quiet words. If the djinn was still speaking, those words were lost in the ether; Kaikobad had become the city, his mind melded together with its brick and mortar, and he was certain that he would now share in its doom.