Drip. Drip. Twenty years of ice melt, wearing away long-buried boulders, reveals a sudden right angle of stone, a geometric peculiarity in the otherwise pristine geology of the Kanchenjunga, most sacred of mountains, five conjoined peaks in the heart of the Himalayas, forbidden to climbers, one of the few remaining secret places of the Earth.
Twenty years of water dripping against a slightly misshapen, bulbous skull. Melek Ahmar, the Lord of Mars, the Red King, the Lord of Tuesday, Most August Rajah of Djinn, asleep for millennia, woken once more by the vagaries of water and stone, found his eyes covered in grit. His mouth, too. He spat out dust and gagged.
His sarcophagus was plain stone, a monolith hewn with crude chisels, his body dumped irreverently inside, the lid forced shut by mortar and spells, constructs of the field produced by some master rune worker, almost as if it were a prison rather than a comfortable resting place.
Which, in fact, it was, of course. Melek Ahmar had not gone to sleep willingly. Well, as willingly as anyone hit on the back of the head with a mace. As far as he could remember, it hadn’t even been in battle. He had been drinking. Some brave soul had crept up behind him and bashed his skull in. It felt like yesterday. He tried to reach back and feel for the lump, but of course his limbs were constrained, first by the coffin-like stricture of the stone and then by the shroud itself, which still retained some potency, its strands of power wrapping him in spider silk.
And this incessant dripping. Was it some devilish torture devised by his enemies? No. It was fucking natural snowmelt. They’d buried him and then just forgotten about him. It was insupportable.
He searched for the field, the ubiquitous power source running through the universe, accessible, detectable only to the djinn, the foundation of their superiority. All djinn could manipulate the field, distort and bend it within their circumference, use it to change the very nature of matter and energy. The breadth and strength of the distortion sphere varied from djinn to djinn; some were weak, wavering things. Melek Ahmar’s was the size of a small mountain.
He flexed his distortion, and felt the power coalesce into something almost solid. The spells meant to neuter him were in tatters. They broke apart like cobwebs, sticky and feather-light on his skin. That was disturbing. Spells were constructs in the field itself, a sort of runic engineering, tied off and meant to last for the ages. Only time ruined spells. The stone was spongy too, like cottage cheese, full of holes. Time did that to stone too. Time and water. How the fuck long had he been asleep?
He gathered his strength. This time, when he flexed his arms, everything gave way in a gratuitously dramatic manner. The sarcophagus flew apart, embedding the mountain with shards of runic stone, and the spell-work shredded, the inky lines of the construct disintegrating, reaffirming to Melek Ahmar that he was the mightiest of djinn, the august, the puissant. It was vaguely disturbing that no one was in attendance to witness such feats. One did not like to brag. If great feats of strength were entirely un-witnessed, it was almost as if they had never happened, which was a shame. Where were the bards?
Melek Ahmar stood up on shaky legs, and found that he had to support himself with the distortion field. His damn legs had atrophied. He looked down at his calves and found that they had inexplicably shrunk to half their mighty girth. His biceps, his dear, beloved biceps, good lord, they were barely bigger than his forearms. At maximum flex! He couldn’t even see the veins properly. At least his gut had shrunk. How long?? And not a sentinel in sight. Not even a raven or a magic frog or something. Had they actually forgotten about him?
His mood worsening by the minute, he stumbled out of the crevice and started the long journey down.
Four days later, he was still hobbling down the mountain, and getting progressively crabbier. His body was emaciated to the point of ridiculousness, and his distortion field wasn’t much better, a shriveled-up thing that could barely float him off the ground. He had killed a mountain goat and used its skin to make shoes, so now he smelled of rotten goat, which was further humiliation to a djinn of his address. Worse, the bits of the shroud he was using as a sarong were rotting off with each step, so that now half his mighty genitalia were flopping around in an ungainly way. He was, of course, endowed with the stature and girth befitting a king, but the cold mountain air and the god knows how many years of hibernation was bound to take a toll, wasn’t it? How was he supposed to ravage unsuspecting Humes in this kind of state? He was irritated enough to flatten mountains. Which he had done in the past, of course. Anyone remember the great peaks of Lemuria? Exactly. Those were the fucking days.
Ambling along in a fugue of pleasant memories, he almost missed the small, unassuming Gurkha man lounging on a rock, an oldish fellow with an unusually impressive moustache, a thing of oiled, clipped beauty, and if it was a little sparse, the upward curl of the tips were symmetrical and precisely pointed.
Not unnaturally, this man was sitting on the rock twirling said moustache, a hand-rolled cigarette clamped between his teeth, as yet unlit. He was clothed simply, and did not seem particularly disturbed by the bitter cold. There was a cheery ease about him, as if he owned these mountains and was inspecting them at his leisure.
Melek Ahmar, almost atop him, stopped and stretched out his arms.
“Tremble before me, Hume! I am Melek Ahmar, the Grand Mark of the Tigris, Enlil of the Ziggurats, the Wrecker of Mountains, the Lord of Tuesday! I have returned!”
“Bhan Gurung.” The Gurkha flashed a smile, teeth white against his leathery brown skin. He struck out his bare hand.
“Ahem, yes, well.” Melek Ahmar, nonplussed, found himself shaking hands with this pathetic, title-less Hume. There was something compelling about his insouciant grin.
“Want a nut?” Gurung asked.
Upon closer inspection Melek Ahmar found that this reprobate was in fact shelling pistachios with his curved kukri and eating them. The rock he was sitting on was littered with the shells. It was a disgrace. However, Melek Ahmar was starving.
“Are they salted?” he asked.
“What kind of criminal salts pistas?” Gurung asked, incensed.
“Quite right,” the Lord of Tuesday said. “Well, move over then.”
It wasn’t quite what he had had in mind, his first day back among the Humes. On the other hand, the chill had receded a bit in the sunlight, the pistachios were sweet, and this mustachioed fellow was handy with the kukri.
“You’re a good Hume,” he said to Gurung, in between mouthfuls. “I had sworn to dismember the first one I found, but no. Behold my awesome mercy. I will stay my hand. But sooner or later, the urge to decapitate someone will become unbearable, be warned.”
Gurung smiled. “I know just where to find many people needing decapitation. But first, a nap.”
* * *
Gurung lived in a hovel attached to a cave. This was actually a fairly generous description. The cave was not one of those cathedral-like structures boasting nature’s hidden majesty. It was more the sort of place where a starving runty bear kicked out of the bear clan might winter, nursing its wounds and promising dire vengeance on its fellows come spring.
The King of Mars, used to the palaces of Luxor, the forgotten luxuries of Gangaridai, the sheer effrontery of ancient Lhasa, was most unimpressed.
“You live here?”
“The entire Kanchenjunga is my house,” Gurung said loftily. “This is just where I keep my things.”
“You live here. In this shack. Attached to a hole in the mountain.”
“You crawled out of a stone box, you said.”
Melek Ahmar could not dispute this fact, and he was too weary to fully express the scale of his previous grandeur and auctoritas, so he merely glowered. It wasn’t a particularly satisfying glower either, because it just seemed to roll off Gurung.
“Look, come inside and have some tea,” Gurung said.
Ensconced together in the cave, where it was warmer, with the kettle on some kind of heating device, Melek Ahmar had to admit this was an improvement on the bitter outdoors. Gurung had quite a snug setup. There were a lot of humming noises, and a little metal box was running around aimlessly on the floor, and magic pictures were flickering along one wall. Melek was a bit disconcerted, but his natural bravado made him lean back and accept it in the manner befitting a king. Obviously this Gurung was a Nephilim sorcerer of some sort, but what a peculiar magic; he could see no disturbance in the field, and for that matter, no purpose to the spells either.
“So, Nephilim, you must be the guardian of my prison after all,” he said, after drinking some tea. “Crafty of them, to keep such an unassuming jailor. Still, your puny frame must hide some strength. Be warned, I can dismember you with a twitch of my finger, even in this weakened state. I have stayed my hand, only because I have taken a liking to your ferocious ugliness.”
“I am not a Nephilim or a sorcerer,” Gurung said. “Nor was I waiting for you, ancient one.”
“What are these things then?” Melek Ahmar demanded, pointing at the images.
“Oh. Yes. How long exactly have you been asleep?”
“Sometime after Memmion the Crass and Horus Light Bringer destroyed Gangaridai and the High King turned the world to ice. I mean I don’t remember any of it because I was blind drunk at the time, but I would have been there otherwise. Those old boys begged me to join the war. Because I had the Mace of One Hit, you know? Get anyone with the MOH, and it’s game over.”
“None of those words have any meaning to me.”
“Hmm. Where are all the kings of djinn?”
“Not many kings around these days.”
“What about those Nephilim in Egypt building the triangle pointy things?”
“Pyramids. They’re called pyramids.”
“Yes, I definitely remember those. Biggest waste of time ever. That bitch Davala was inciting them to do it, for some convoluted purpose, no doubt. Anyway, how long ago was that?”
“That was like five or six thousand years ago.”
“What about those Greeks? That Menelaus fellow who made a big stink about his wife . . . I remember those savages used to make a good wine.”
“That was over three thousand years ago . . .”
“That’s not good.” Melek Ahmar frowned. Four thousand years asleep? Three thousand? That was excessive even for djinn.
“And this sorcery?” he asked, pointing at the moving pictures.
“It’s technology. The Virtuality. Shows us what’s happening everywhere. It’s all small machines. We’ve become very good at making small machines. There are millions of microscopic, semi-organic machines in the air right now, going in and out of our bodies, scrubbing the air, getting rid of disease, fighting with other, hostile nano-stuff. It was the only way, they said, to save the planet. Nanotech. We live in clouds of it, we make it in our bodies, and if there’s enough of the good kind in the air, we live, and if not, we die. It’s the price of being citizens.”
“Is that the buzzing noise?”
Gurung pointed at two sleek-looking boxes. “Nanotech fabricator. Solar battery for power. It’s creating an artificial little microclimate, because there’s only one of me here, so not enough for equilibrium. It blows the good stuff around the house. Keeps me alive, supposedly. Used to be a time when you could walk around outside. Still can, most days, but when the bad wind blows, you’ll be dead in an hour. Of course, in the city, they have enough nannites in the air to actually create real climate conditions, so they can engineer clouds and rain and clear skies on demand.”
Melek Ahmar grunted. “No little machines in the sky can hurt me.” He was fairly sure about that. Still, it seemed as if these Humes had somehow mastered weather magic.
“Of course, ancient one.”
“There is a city, you mentioned.”
“Kathmandu Incorporated, in a valley almost two hundred kilometers from here. It’s the only one that survived in these parts.”
“Is it a great city?”
“A most beautiful one,” Gurung said. He waved his hand, and the images on the wall flickered to life in three dimensions, a topography of spires and pagodas, embedded with towers sculpted in sinuous shapes. Sleek pod-like cars floated in the sky, either from cables or some kind of maglev, or even the holy grail of anti-grav. The skies overhead were a clear, austere blue, not a smudge of pollution anywhere. The voiceover descriptions meant little to Melek, but Gurung’s pictures were impressive.
“Humph,” Melek Ahmar said. This place reminded him of ancient Gangaridai, the first city of djinn, now gone from this world. Of course, Gangaridai had been superior. Still. What luck that the first city he should find would be this wondrous, fragile thing ripe for crushing? “This city will do.”
“Do for what?” Gurung smiled.
“I am a king. It appears all of my subjects are missing,” Melek Ahmar said. “I require worshippers, courtly followers, and sycophants. Also, a harem and bodyguards and moderately loyal drinking companions. This Kathmandu city shall bow down before me! I will rule once again.”
“Of course, Your Eminence.”
“Who is the king of this city?”
“We have no kings, Worshipful Lord.”
“Ah, you are republican scum then. Anarchists.”
“You know republicans?”
“We invented republicans,” Melek Ahmar said. “That arch anarchist Memmion is the father of the movement. He started the great war in the first place, did you know that? They always blame Horus, but it was his big bastard sword cutting someone in two that started the damn thing. I hated that fucker, but he was a magnificent bastard when drunk. I can’t tell you how many times we got fish faced and blasted apart entire mountains. That big lake where the Nile comes from? That was us. I’m the rightful father of the Nile, I am. Who rules below, then? Some scummy council of merchants? It’s always scummy merchants.”
“The city has a perfect ruler,” Gurung said. “Universally hailed.”
“A perfect tyrant? There is no such thing. Other than myself, perhaps.”
“It is not conscious, so it wants nothing. It thinks at the speed of light. It can see and hear everything, even your thoughts most of the time. It keeps score of everything, no matter how great or small.”
“This is a riddle. Oh, it’s the Sphinx! The answer is always the Sphinx!” Melek Ahmar said.
“No, Great Lord of Tuesday,” Gurung said, puzzled. “It is Karma.”