It rained for three days before the first tsunami hit the coast. It was a small wave, only five feet high by the time it crashed into the mangrove forest, which served as a storm wall for the southern coast. There were only a few casualties, more from acts of idiocy than the actual tide. In Bangladesh, there were always a few casualties. The worst affected were the trees. The aftershocks were felt in the countries surrounding the Bay of Bengal. It was unusual seismic activity, underwater somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far from traditional fault lines. Scientists termed it an aberration and vowed to study it further.
Indelbed didn’t mind the rain. It kept him cool. He had fled Wari after the fire in the market. Many people had died. He went back two days later, walking through the remains of charred wood, blackened tin sheets, scraps of cloth, and rotting vegetables, everything laced with ashes and the lingering smell of burned bodies. He knew that smell. Nightmares haunted him from that night. He was struck by remorse and the certitude that there was something alien inside him, some urge to destruction, because he remembered vividly the joy of loosening the fire, the fierce bloodlust, and could not deny that he would do it again, no doubt, if pushed. He almost turned back then, but it was the urn he needed, the jar of earth stacked somewhere in the night guard’s hut of horrors, which contained his cavernous home and his blood brother, calling incessantly to him. It was a desperate idea. He wanted to return to his prison, a place cool, dark, and peaceful.
The hut was abandoned. The boy and his keeper had both left. Police had taken the body of Ramiz. The hut was padlocked from the outside, and a notice hung on the door, declaring the place off-limits pending a court order and investigation. Indelbed broke the lock with a brick, the metal so brittle that it snapped like honeycomb. The room inside was basic, with a bed, mosquito net, cupboard, table, and chair. A small boxy television sat in a corner, a table fan; tin plates, cups, and bowls were stored in a chest. The place had been ransacked a bit, the police looking for any cash, perhaps, but otherwise left intact. The urn was under the bed, rolled to one corner.
“Ah, Master, I knew you would return!” the urn said as soon as he touched it. “I knew it! I said, ‘The Young Master wouldn’t leave me on this dirty floor, rolled up like a flower vase…’”
“Sorry about that, I had a bit of a problem with the locals,” Indelbed said. “In fact, I wanted your help with that…”
“Master! Why, I would be delighted to help! I can name the ninety-nine djinn Solomon kept in perpetual slavery, I can give you the recipe for the special Halwa he ate on Wednesdays, I’ve got a pretty good idea about the technique he used on his favorite concubine, which used to make her squeal, I can—”
“It’s a bit of a rush, actually. The police might be after me. I want to go back inside.”
“Back inside?”
“Into the murder pit. You said it was deactivated, right? Does that mean I can come and go? Without breaking you, I mean?”
“Well, theoretically…”
“Can’t you teach me?”
“You’d have to master folding n space,” the urn said doubtfully. “It took Matteras years to prepare the cave and even longer to fold core fire.”
“I can see the field. Not just spells and runes and permanent constructs, I mean I can actually see the free movement of particles, even when they’re not being distorted,” Indelbed said. “My eyes use the field particles to see instead of photons.”
“Oh. Well! What a stupendous talent, Master! Even Solomon could only see with regular light! If only I had eyes, I would use them to look into your magical orbs—”
Indelbed was forced to stuff the urn into his blanket at this point, because people were looking at him funny. His clothes were ill fitting because he had stolen them, and his blanket was covered in soot and very likely worse things. He walked barefoot and stank. He looked like a beggar, not one of the prosperous ones either, but the mentally ill kind who were covered in filth and really homeless. It rankled. His house was right there, occupied by djinn, and no one even remembered him, not even Butloo. It was as if he and his father had been erased, their home, their lives, just brushed out. He was obsessed with the house, felt a visceral need to retake it.
Without it, he supposed he was a beggar. Over the past three days, all of his food had actually come from begging. He loitered around the street stall restaurants at night, and they often paid him to go away; he never took money, asking instead for the food left over on the dirty plates—invariably they gave him that and more, disgust warring with pity. He supposed long ago he would have died of shame rather than eat like this, but he had spent the last ten years eating wyrm meat, so leftover rice seemed like a step up.
Food was harder to come across during the day, however, and there was a greater chance of being recognized as the blind black boy who started fires. He walked swathed in his blanket, despite the heat, and avoided lingering anywhere. He had found an empty lot that was stacked with large concrete pipes, kept there by contractors installing new storm drains. He slept inside one of them. It reminded him of a tunnel. The second night someone attacked him, trying to drag him out by the foot, but a quick shove of the field sent the assailant sprawling. He slept badly, the darkness crowded with nightmares of burning men, the field always on, a whisper of madness, but he was used to that.
He did not go to the pipes until dark. It was dangerous to stay there for too long, because while the night guard tolerated street people sleeping in them at night, the road contractors during the day would most definitely not appreciate people setting up permanent habitation. By the third night in the pipes, he had set out his route, identifying several shady spots where sympathetic vendors let him sit on the footpath and two abandoned buildings where he could sneak in for a nap. Food and water were from begging and in meager portions; he was not too disturbed by a diet that would have caused starvation to more prosperous persons.
That night, he took stock inside his pipe.
I have nothing, he said to himself, other than this urn. Ironic, that my only possession was given to me by Uncle Matteras, who imprisoned me for no reason. I am at an absolute zero. I fell into that hole with my luggage and a cell phone. I have left those behind too. I have nowhere to go, and soon perhaps my escape will be noticed, and the djinns will start looking for me. If I stay in the street for too long, I will eventually get into trouble. Someone will try to rob me, or rape me, or beat me. I will hurt them, and then the police will know it was me who set the fires. I am all alone in this world. My father is dead. He must be. He would never have voluntarily left the house. Or he is still in a coma. It is all the same, I am truly an orphan.
My family sold me to the djinn. My master left me to die. No one recognizes me, not even Butloo. There is no one in the whole world who will help me, and many who will gladly kill me.
I wish I could go back to the murder pit. I wish God’s Eye was beside me. It is pathetic, that I am free and long for my prison. That’s the little boy talking. The little boy is no good. He’s just going to crawl back into the hole and hide. I’m going to be the dragon. Givaras thought I’d burn, but I lived. I am the dragon. I’m going to take back my house. I’m going to kill the djinn inside. I’m going to find Matteras and kill him. And then I’m going to find Givaras and stuff him back in the urn. I’m going to feed him to God’s Eye. I am the dragon. You’re all going to pay.
He went to sleep cradling the urn and dreamed of burning in core fire.
The second earthquake hit the bay early that morning. Tremors were felt all the way to Dhaka, waking up infants and setting the dogs barking. The pipe adjacent to Indelbed swayed alarmingly and finally rolled off, nearly crushing a little street boy sleeping nearby. Indelbed himself was cocooned inside his field and did not feel anything. In the bay, near the underwater ruins of Gangaridai, a great school of fish watched the disturbance with obvious irritation. The epicenter was at the northern subduction plate near the coast of Myanmar, where for aeons, one plate had been slipping under another with little fuss, at a rate slow enough to be largely unremarked.
The school had sacrificed some of its members to investigate the phenomenon, and before they died, they had reported a large field disruption at concentrated points along the fault line, causing periodic eruptions, where thousands of tons of rocks were ejected from the overlaying plate, ultimately creating the tsunamis. The second of these great waves, generated by a quake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale in Myanmar, was much larger than the first, measuring over twelve feet from trough to crest and traveling over 250 kilometers per hour from the center, a wall of energy that shot through the ocean like a cannonball, wrecking itself on the already storm-ravaged coast.
This time, the trees were not the only casualties. Over a thousand people died in the coastal region, either drowned by the wave, or buried by the tremor, or destroyed by the ensuing storm. Geologists and oceanographers came from all the neighboring countries, fitting the current activity to their working models, trying to predict the next big one. Reputations were made as this paper or that proved to be correct; the consensus was that the hitherto peaceful fault line had built up intolerable stress over time, and this was far from the end. Excited historians claimed that this was exactly how Atlantis, or the great antediluvian civilizations, had gone down, and National Geographic discussed sending a dive crew to see if it could spot any sign of volcanic activity.
Government agencies rushed about, provisioning storm shelters, sending warnings, collecting stocks of biscuits and saltines and blankets.
Bahamut, who had seen the power being expended underwater briefly with his own eyes, sat in his watery home with his fin on the trigger, and patiently waited for someone to come rescue him from his intolerable predicament.
The journey to the Hub was long. Roger spent the entire duration following Golgoras, watching his every move. He volunteered for every task, proving to be something of a mechanical savant, even coming up with a new calibration of the gas ratio, forcing the captain to grudgingly acknowledge that he was a useful fellow. By the end of the journey, he would be widely recognized as de facto first mate, even by the cartel crew.
Maria spent the journey learning to fire a gun, with off-duty sicarios happily teaching her how to strip and load assault rifles. In private, she and Rais explored the workings of the invisible knife. This was their secret weapon, their ace in the hole, for it was clearly a djinn killer, an assassin’s tool, probably the only thing they had that could hurt Matteras in case it came to a fight.
Knife was a loosely accurate name for what was essentially a formless, invisible object. As Maria had observed earlier, it seemed to hover not just out of sight, but out of existence entirely, a sort of potential lethality waiting to be called into being. She kept it leashed to her wrist, for it was liable to get lost altogether. The weapon itself was almost like a whip. It seemed to hit about a foot in front of her fist when she threw a punch, making five little ripples in the air, micro-disturbances that Rais could see using his glasses. They had tested this once against Barabas from a safe distance, and the knife had shredded his field. It was similarly efficacious against mundane objects, shattering wooden posts, even gouging five deep rents in a steel plate.
“Last resort, right?” Rais said, watching her attack the decking from a safe distance.
“Yeah,” Maria said. “Like Raul said, no point having a weapon if you can’t use it.”
“Right,” Rais said. “Please take it easy on the ship.”
“This thing is awesome,” she said. “I’m going to stab Dargoman with it when I get back home.”
“Yeah, but right now you’re about to make a hole in the hull. If Golgoras comes in here he’s going to have a heart attack.”
“Rais, there’s been more storms at home,” Maria said. “I’ve been getting updates.”
“Dhaka?”
“Streets are flooded, but no extensive damage yet,” she said. “There are hurricanes and tsunamis hitting the coasts, though. A lot of casualties in Cox’s Bazar.”
“How many?”
“Estimated twenty thousand according to the Daily Star.”
“That many?”
“They’re having trouble explaining what’s causing all this,” Maria said. “Underwater earthquakes in the bay seems to be the consensus.”
“Fuck. We’re really running out of time.”
“You best be persuasive with Memmion then.”
The Hub was somewhere in the tropics, invisible to the human eye, approachable only through the route mapped out in Golgoras’s prized RAS charts. It had been created long ago, with magic not easily replicated today, for it occupied a slant of space slightly altered from reality. Precise turns and maneuvers had to be made to enter this pocket universe in an invisible four-dimensional lock; one wrong step would send you spinning back out to empty sky. At last, after an hour of careful navigation, the port flashed into view through the haze of distortion, brilliant from the sun, a series of interlocked giant spheres made of reflective burnished copper, like droplets of fire, moored airships dotting their circumference.
They were all awed, standing on the deck, marveling at something completely alien hanging in the sky in plain sight, the first real evidence of the superiority and might boasted by the djinn. The Hub had three central spheres made of crystal, each large enough to contain a city block, connected by wide tubes. Inside were the functional habitats for the djinn and Ghul who crewed the airships, warehouses for stashing loot, and manufactories for repairing and, indeed, assembling the ships themselves. Long ago there had been great foundries and shipwrights for making everything, but nowadays, they mostly just ordered the parts in from Hyundai.
The bottom halves of the spheres were given over to nature, giant trees growing upside down, the canopy trailing earthward, teeming with a riot of confused birds. Further, smaller spheres and tubes spoked out from the main circumference, forming docks and ancillary structures, some with obvious functions. Rais counted something like fifty airships of various sizes moored, about half of them small pleasure craft.
“I can’t see the dreadnought.” Golgoras’s eye telescoped alarmingly. “Something is wrong. Memmion hasn’t left the Hub in two centuries…”
The Hub was strictly for use by the RAS, an avowed egalitarian club espousing strong republican views, yet there were still some perks for seniority, because Golgoras made straight for one of the choice central berths around the largest sphere and was permitted to moor the ship with minimum delay. There were no officials at hand to greet them, just a uniformed Ghul leaning expressionlessly against a wall. Everything was apparently self-service.
“Where is the harbormaster?” Golgoras said. “Something is wrong.”
The pilot hurried Rais and Maria down, leaving Roger and the crew with the ship. They followed a winding, sunlit corridor to the club bar, where a smattering of djinn greeted Golgoras in a variety of tongues. This was not the captains’ bar, which was much nicer, Golgoras explained, but sadly out of bounds for visitors. Even at the club bar, there was a large book at the door where he had to sign their names and expend a minute quantity of his auctoritas to gain them entry.
“What’s going on?” he asked the bartender. “Where is everyone?”
“Over at Memmion’s.”
“I was heading there next.”
“Half the sphere’s there,” the bartender said. “He’s gone.”
“What?!”
“He got some visitors, and then they got into the dreadnought and flew off.”
“He took the ship? Left? Why? With who?”
The bartender shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? Between you and me, Memmion’s been acting odd the last fifty years. Erratic as fuck. Time we think about a new chairman for the society, maybe…”
“He built the Hub,” Golgoras growled, turning to leave. “And bartenders don’t get a fucking vote.”
“He’s going to spit in our drinks next time we come here,” Rais said. He had to run to keep up with the djinn.
“He’s an Ageist cunt. That’s one of those neo-clubs where they sit around talking shit about the Lore. There’ve been more and more of them around. I’m going to tell Memmion to sky a few of them when I see him.”
By the time they reached Memmion’s door, it was fairly clear that he had left abruptly, and the crowd of djinns thronging the corridor had no clue where. Golgoras interviewed a few of the higher-ranking ones, including the chief mechanic of the sphere, who claimed that the dreadnought had left with her full complement of Ghul crew, but none of the Ifrit officers. Three visitors had come in the night with a hired craft, which too had left with the dreadnought. No one had noticed them; they had apparently known the ward keys for entering the sphere undetected through Memmion’s private dock, a backdoor entrance into the Hub long unused and mostly forgotten. Memmion’s own security of interlocking spells, brutally powerful, were undisturbed.
The dreadnought, properly named the Sublime Porte, the pride of the fleet, the largest, most dangerous ship ever built by the Royal Aeronautics Society, had not slipped moorage for over a hundred years, the last time being when it had accidentally come loose from its ties during a rare conjunction of telluric disruption and a thunderstorm. Now, both the elder djinn and the dreadnought were gone without a trace. The steward of the Windward Sphere was visibly distraught, and people were looking at him accusingly, as if he should either produce the missing edifices immediately or furnish everyone with a ready-made explanation.
The hall was now completely crammed with onlookers, the entire sphere jammed up like the site of a major disaster, the djinn being much addicted to gossip and conjecture.
“Full Assembly of all captains present in twelve hours!” the steward said, brushing aside Golgoras. “I will present my findings then.”
The steward promptly locked himself in his office and refused to entertain any further visitors. Fuming, Golgoras led them back to the ship.
“It’s Matteras! They said three djinns—it must be them,” Rais said as soon as they were back on the bridge. “He kidnapped Beltrex and Elkran, and now he’s taken Memmion.”
“How, hmm? Memmion is four hundred pounds, with a field that’s like a brick wall at a hundred yards.”
“I don’t know how!” Rais said. “With threats, or blackmail, or ambush. You said yourself Memmion hasn’t left the Hub in hundreds of years. How fighting fit was he? Maybe he was asleep and they just carted him off wrapped in a carpet…”
“And the Sublime Porte?”
“They took the ship, Golgoras. It’s Matteras, for god’s sake—he’s smart and ruthless, he’s running rings around everyone.”
“We should wait for the Assembly,” Golgoras said. “Find out what the steward knows.”
“He doesn’t know shit! Did you see his face? He was shitting his pants. What will the Assembly achieve? They’re going to dither around for a bit and then eat canapés and get drunk. We’ve got to fly! We can catch them, Golgoras! We’re just a day behind!”
“Ah, Your Excellency, what are you going to do once you catch them?” Maria said. “Like don’t they have the big ship now with all the guns?”
“Sephiroth can take her, maybe,” Golgoras said doubtfully. “If we can sneak up above her. It’s going to be tough, though. We’ll take casualties.”
“We’ve got the rockets,” Roger said. “Tenoch’s snipers are really good. We could probably hit a bunch of them before they even see us.”
“Guys, don’t worry, we’re not going to fight,” Rais said.
“They’ll just give up and hand everyone over, I suppose?” Golgoras asked.
“We are going to negotiate.”