“Tonight, Lord of Tuesday, you shall become the God King of this city.” Bhan Gurung’s bow was particularly low and flourishy. In the Gurung lexicon of physical movements, which Melek Ahmar had taken to studying closely, this was especially menacing, as it presaged that he was about to embroil his master in something egregious.
With his mouth full of potatoes and yak steak, the djinn king was caught off guard, and by the time he had swallowed, the opportunity to run away was lost.
“Tonight, I am playing backgammon with ReGi,” Melek Ahmar said with as much dignity as he could muster.
“No sir, tonight we are girding ourselves for momentous acts.”
“Tonight I have the stomach ache . . .”
Gurung gave only a sidelong glance at the table, groaning under the scattered remnants of an entire yak plus the condiments, side dishes, sauces, narcotics, and unguents required to make said yak palatable, but it was enough to make his damnable point, and cause Melek Ahmar to retreat further into his routine of well-worn excuses. The damn Gurkha was a bully, there were no two ways about it, and to fend off his bland smile for long was exhausting.
“Look, Gurung, now is not the time for reckless acts, we are accruing karma at a fantastic clip, yes, thanks to your plan, and we should enjoy life, throw a party, bestow our munificence upon our flock . . .” Melek Ahmar said.
“Lord, I propose no reckless act.”
“Ah, good, well, that’s settled then.” I don’t believe you. Every act you propose is reckless. You are the most unsatisfactory servant in the entire history of servitude.
“In fact, all I propose is that we leave this garden, which, as charming as it is in its infinite variety, has been growing fetid and—”
“Fetid?”
“No doubt the combination of your magnificence combined with the dankness of the lady’s herbs, but fetid, certainly. I simply propose we take a stroll outside, socialize with the city, pay a house call or two.”
“Stroll where?”
“To the golden tower so visibly disturbing our sunsets.”
“We are not attacking the tower,” Melek Ahmar said. “I forbid it!”
“Attack? Why, Lord, we are welcomed guests there.”
“What? The tower of your mortal enemy, the tower which you stare at for hours at a time while eating pistas and touching your knife in a suggestive way, that tower?”
Whereupon Bhan Gurung flourished a note handwritten on fancy paper and sealed with actual wax, which indeed included an invitation for supper at midnight, complete with a thoughtful list of pass codes to get past security. It was signed by one Hamilcar Pande.
“Who is he?”
“He is the sheriff, Karma’s cat’s-paw, the failsafe. A laughable concept, an eyewash position, but he is a man who thinks he can actually live up to his rank. He is too stupid to understand his role as a rubber stamp, and therefore dangerous in his own way, because he might do something unexpected, such as this. Karma has given him carte blanche, and he has invited us in. We will incur no karmic loss for what happens tonight.”
“It’s a trap.”
“A trap is only effective if it can swallow its prey.”
“Hmmphh. No power exists in this city which can swallow me.” You compel me to say these things, and I can see where this is going, Gurung, you bastard, I’ll have no peace until that damn tower comes down. Damn the day I met you.
So at eleven o’clock two djinn and one Bhan Gurung strolled down the street out of the garden, turned right on the boulevard and then left, past the flower shop, past a group of revelers at the garden bar, where they were recognized and had to decline many drinks, past the impromptu concert that had sprung up next to the wrought-iron bridge one street over, although ReGi lingered a few moments with a wistful look at the very handsome K-pop idol–looking fellow who was belting out hits, straddling the stage with a sweaty, showoffy look.
In any case, despite this dawdling, far too soon they were at the perimeter of the tower, girded for war, their intent unmistakable. He had a sledgehammer hastily ensorcelled with flashy blue light, not the Mace of One Hit, but really, that thing was a bit problematic at the best of times, what with hardly being able to lay it down without accidentally wrecking something, and people not appreciating impromptu craters and subsequently cursing him and spreading mean stories about him. No, the Hammer of Dawn was flashy and debonair and rather easier to use.
ReGi had her hand-rolled cigarette clamped martially between her lips, and assured him she had other weapons of immense proportion on her person, which, given her gothic black vampire cloak, could well be true. Gurung had his knife and that mad look in his eyes, which was enough.
The tower compound was walled, and the gate was predictably closed. Three fist-sized drones buzzed alertly, and started to converge on them as they slowed down. ReGi waved her hands and her distortion field sprang to life, vibrant and powerful like the wild forest she had nurtured in the alternate Garden of Dreams. The drones began to slow and list, as numerous things failed within them on a quantum level, and then ReGi did something to turn up the entropy within the field, so that they actually began to flake and rust and shear apart, aging visibly, until three very feeble, shortsighted drones persisted, following them in a querulous manner and emitting their aches and pains within electronic sighs.
Bhan Gurung, meanwhile, had tried the first of his passwords on a manual touchpad, and the gate slid open, granting them ingress onto a short graveled path, neatly raked by some mechanical gardener. Their footsteps crunched eerily on the pebbles as they approached the heavy double wooden doors, carved in dragon motifs.
“Allow me, please,” Melek Ahmar said.
He swung his hammer and smashed it right into the center of the stupid dragon head. The effect was gratifying. The door simply disintegrated, wiping out several thousand bittos’ worth of irreplaceable two-hundred-year-old wood carving. They stomped into a large, cool white entrance hall, marbled and empty, somewhat like a posh mausoleum.
“Halt,” a voice chimed from all directions. Marble-sized drones emerged from recesses in the ceiling, a swarm of metal bees promising lethal kinetic force. “Rustic One and Two, and Lady of the Garden. You have been identified. Kindly cease and desist. This is Karma.”
ReGi snapped her field on, and they were instantly covered in its eldritch shield. Melek Ahmar, as befitting a warrior king, stayed loose, the hammer dangling in a louche manner from his left hand. Everything was always being recorded in this era. One had to constantly strike glamorous poses.
“Karma the tyrant machine,” he said. “You’re here too? What luck.”
“I am everywhere,” Karma replied. “But yes, for tonight I am mostly here.”
“Good, in that case I can mostly kill you, when I turn this place to rubble presently.”
“I cannot be killed, Rustic One,” Karma said. “But my algorithms predict that you can be, despite your lineage. I request you to leave the city, Rustic One. It is not my preference to harm you.”
“I think we both know I’m not leaving,” Melek Ahmar said with a tiny hint of regret. He glared at Bhan Gurung, who himself was sauntering about with his typical rakish look. The Red King does not walk away from fights with God-Machines. Am I that fucking easily manipulated? I’ve got to work on that . . . “My name is Melek Ahmar, I am the Red King, the Lord of Tuesday, et cetera et cetera, I’m sure you’ve heard of me, and even if you haven’t¸ I don’t give a FUCK!”
He screamed because at just that moment the bee drones converged on him at supersonic speed, all intent on tearing out chunks from his body. Luckily ReGi had been paying attention. Her distortion field pulled the three of them back to back, and then turned opaque, a solid shield that crackled along the circumference with electrical discharge. The kinetic swarm converged and then bounced off the shield, pinballing around the room, smashing holes into the fine marble walls. After five minutes of admiring her handiwork, Melek Ahmar reached out with a massive wave of power, a concussive blast that simply turned all the drones to dust.
“I am disappointed that it has come to this,” Karma said. “We charge you with willful destruction of city property and refusal to disperse. Colonel Shakia. You may take over defense of this tower and repel the hostiles.”
“Certainly,” Colonel Shakia replied smoothly, her voice also echoing around the ruined hall. “Thank you, lady and gentlemen, for your demonstration. I am Colonel Shakia of Defense. Please note that I am now authorized to use lethal force. Consider this your last chance to retreat before I whip you like dogs and scour the skin off your backs.”
“I want her head too,” Melek Ahmar said.
“They’re at the top,” Gurung said, racing for the stairs.
The stairwell was broad and deep, a spiraling marble monstrosity that stretched up and up. ReGi groaned as they got to it.
“You want me to climb up all that way?”
Gurung grinned. “You’re getting a bit pudgy, Lady Djinn, if you don’t mind me saying so. Some stairs would be good for you.”
ReGi scowled. Which was her normal expression, and thus failed to convey the sheer depth of her current sulk.
Melek Ahmar half expected the stairwell to be booby-trapped, as it would have been in the old days, with spikes and pits and hot oil falling from murder holes, but they were left alone until they got to the next floor. The double doors were wide open, and they could see the grand hallway filled with precious artifacts, all glittering with gold.
Colonel Shakia cared nothing for these things. A couple of large drones came out of the entrance, spewing liquid fire, barreling through a priceless statue from the ancient Pala civilization. Heat washed over them as they crouched beneath ReGi’s spherical shield. Melek Ahmar laughed, because who attacks djinn with fire, after all, and then remembered that Gurung was perhaps not so fond of flames, and in any case this was some kind of unclean, phosphorous heat that was uncomfortable and possibly even harmful to him, and ReGi was sweating somewhat, so he stepped out of her sphere and charged the drones, his hammer flashing. They swiveled to face him, and in that moment’s gap he shot out a fist of air, a primal extrusion of his field that bashed them against the wall. He struck with the Hammer of Dawn, reducing the drones into requisite parts.
After that, it was a running battle up the staircase, close quarters and nasty. On the third-floor landing, they got hit by liquid nitrogen and then some kind of EMP shockwaves, and on the fourth by some even older drones using projectile weapons. The enemy ranged from football-sized spheres to tiny machines the size of ants, but Melek Ahmar smashed through them all with only a few scrapes.
“This is easy!” he bellowed. “And fun! Finally a good fight!”
“It’s not,” ReGi said through gritted teeth.
“They’re herding us,” Gurung said. “Testing.”
“Yup. Karma’s watching our reactions to different attacks,” ReGi said. “She’s mapping our abilities.”
Melek Ahmar frowned. “Tricky devil.” Good thing I have yet to reveal the full magnificence of my power. These idiots think I’m some chump with a hammer.
“I thought we were invited,” ReGi said.
“They’re not all on the same page,” Gurung said. “Something to exploit when we get to the top.”
Antigravity was easy for ReGi to disrupt, and those state-of-the-art drones were murderously expensive, something Colonel Shakia had figured out, apparently, because she was now sending them very old, mechanical machines moving on gears, nightmare apparitions like attack horse-dogs that moved on four squat horse legs and carried a mouthful of nasties. Some of them had scorpion tails sprouting from their shoulder humps, with poisoned stingers. These were problematic; they used momentum to get through the distortion field, and their internal mechanisms were somehow more resistant to many of ReGi’s tricks.
Melek Ahmar drew his field in, reducing it to a millimeter-thick skin, harder than tungsten, harder, indeed, than any metal known to man, for he had once walked through dragon flame like this, through the core fire at the center of the Earth. This was one of his specialties, they used to call him Ahmar Steelskin in the old days, even the fabled lance of Kuriken had blunted against his chest. Of course, that stupid Homer had stolen his story and fame and given it to puny Achilles, and then woven a great boring poem around it. There was a case pending about that in the djinn courts.
He motioned the others back and let the first three horse-dogs converge on him, laughed as their stings and mouth spikes bounced off his armor. He brought the hammer down on one head, smashed it to bits, and then frowned as the thing kept on going undeterred. Two others now had his arms, and were trying to drag him down. Gurung darted out of one side, ridiculously brave, and somehow his knife plunged into some weak spot near the abdomen of the damaged hound, a quick, effortless stab through steel that made the horse-dog keel over and lie kicking on the stairs like a butchered animal, unable to regain its feet.
“Gyroscope,” Gurung said, hastily retreating behind ReGi’s shield. “Nothing in the heads. Their brain is in their stomach.”
A healthy Melek Ahmar possessed a terrible strength, wholly unrelated to his disruption field. He raised his arms above his head and lifted his attackers straight off the ground, and as they scrambled in the air he smashed them together repeatedly, until parts started flying off and they made whining machine yelps that sounded peculiarly like actual dogs in distress.
Onward and upward, in an orgy of violence and littered parts, oil and metal, and now and then blood, as they took small nicks and cuts. The sheer volume and diversity of weaponry at Colonel Shakia’s disposal slowed them down, until even Melek Ahmar’s enthusiasm began to wane. After an interminable trek they reached the penultimate floor, where the walls were actually curved up, the tip of the tower narrowing considerably along the way, the stairwell itself becoming much tighter, no longer marble but a functional steel, and it was apparent that the next floor up had only one room at the very apex. Here the doors were thick, shining metal, obviously impenetrable, and as they approached the landing, they heard movement behind them, and a portion of the stairwell smoothly receded, leaving them stranded. Here at last they were at the chokepoint, a killing field prepared lovingly by Colonel Shakia and her mistress Karma.
“As much as I have enjoyed our game, I must ask you now to surrender,” Colonel Shakia said, her voice echoing around. “The door ahead is impenetrable, even for you, Rustic One. You are, in fact, in a metal box. Karma has analyzed your powers and prepared a variety and scale of drone attack which has currently a sixty-eight percent chance of penetrating your defenses. This percentage will go up as we test you further. You will fall in the end, djinn or not.”
Melek Ahmar bared his teeth. At last, a worthy adversary. “I piss on your sixty-eight percent. I am the djinn king Melek Ahmar, One of Seven. You have analyzed only a tithe of my strength. I can reduce this entire tower to dust.”
“Then we are at an impasse,” Colonel Shakia said. “Karma has prepared even for this eventuality. Should you unleash the full potential of your power, I am authorized to release the Q bomb. I am unable to explain the exact physics of it, but its main function is to reset all quantum states within a radius, essentially scrambling the area into a primordial soup. I am assured that even your so called ‘distortion effect,’ which relies on a type of exotic field of non-baryonic nature, possibly—even such a thing might be disrupted, although we lack the data to simulate its precise manner. Karma now posits that your field might be the overlay of a ghost universe, a previous iteration of our current state, a sad remnant, which would make you partial ghosts, relics of a dead distant past. I digress. Your choices are clear. Either leave the city, or we all die a very unusual death. Frankly, I’m bored with this whole thing so I implore you to decide quickly.”
“Bored?” Melek Ahmar roared. “Bored?!”
“Or a third option,” Gurung said with a wink. “We open the door.”
He put his palm flat on the door and murmured an incantation and like open sesame the metal slabs slid apart.