IN THE VAST, vaulted halls of the sunken city, great walkways form concentric paths through a sea of magma. The Empress’ palace is far beneath the waves, but the grand dome rises so high that it could be a dark summer sky. The empire the heroes have leapt hither and thither through time to destroy is a monument to hubris, to the infinite reach for power, forever exceeding the grasp of the souls who seek it.
“Crack the seals,” Jinn says, “I’ll keep them away from you.”
“Alone?” the Soldier cries.
For an answer the little creature smiles and rockets skyward. Rising, there is nothing to her but the abstract beauty of a violent sunset. It’s her descents that are meteoric. The Guardians crane their necks, then yelp and scatter.
Jinn is an Ifrit, a fire spirit from the misty past, born of pure magic. The talons and cogs that make the Guardians so fearsome represent the extinction of her race. The Guardians are weapons made to build an empire, banish doubt, bring order. To do a lot of things she doesn’t believe in. The rivalry is personal; they would have used Jinn’s soul to power one of these monsters if she’d let them, so she turns the air they breathe into a spiralling inferno. Chaos and anger swirl in her heart. She shares them freely.
While she does, the Soldier swings the Titan Arm into the mechanism. Like the Frog, the knight who refused to be kissed, he is not the same man he was when the tale began. How he came to wear the arm of an ancient golem is a part of the story that varies more than most. They all agree he opened the door, though, so he sinks the infinite weight of the Titan’s fingers into the lock.
He glances back just in time to see a Guardian charge down the walkway toward him. There is nothing he can do with the arm buried in metal. The beast is going to plough into him at a terrifying sprint and use its great teeth on the parts of him that aren’t invincible magical artefacts.
Jinn saves him, again. She streaks into the monster sideways, a comet tail dragging behind her. The impact would kill anything merely human. It barely slows her down. The Empress was right to fear her kind. The Guardian ploughs up a rising wave of magma then disappears beneath it, drowning in fire.
Jinn arcs back as the Soldier finally frees his arm. They hear the grinding of titanic gears as the way forward opens.
“Too close,” he says.
Jinn dimples and bares her entire array of fangs, joyously panting smoke, when an arm erupts from the lava and grabs her by one tapered ankle. The Guardian is a skeleton now, everything living burned away. It drags her under the surface in a final vicious plunge.
Her mouth opens wide, as if to say something before she vanishes; their passage marked by nothing but ripples. The Soldier pushes fingers through his steaming hair. This habitual gesture would once have required his left hand, but he only made that mistake once.
He calls her name. Heat shimmers and little bubbles pop. He raises the ancient hand to reach in for her, wondering if it can stand the heat but stops when he hears a slap.
Jinn clambers out of the fiery lake, first one palm, then the other. She drags herself back onto the walkway as magma pours off her, a maiden emerging from the pool. She tries to rise back into the air and finds herself too heavy. Laughing, she shakes herself and wrings molten stone from the burning mane of her hair. The Soldier realizes the Ifrit didn’t have anything to confess in that final moment; she just needed to hold her breath.
Far away, the Prince, his one true love, and the Frog fling the great doors open and fight their way into legend. The Robot, the only one of the band of heroes culled from the future, slams the gates closed. The Soldier and the Ifrit still need to join the Prince; the story isn’t finished yet.
There are many ways down to the Mammon Machine. Many paths to the end. They find a funicular and descend toward the heart of the palace. The lift is redundant for her, but it’s a chance to rest.
“There’s something we haven’t said,” Jinn sighs, “the Titan’s arm, your eye, your heart─they’re all powered the same way the guardians are. I was born magical. If we win—if we destroy the machine—we won’t just change history; we’ll erase magic from this world entirely. Neither of us will live.”
“I’ll follow you,” the Soldier says, “either way.” They descend in silence.
“Do you still wish I’d been born human?” the Ifrit says after a while. They would both be dead already if she had been.
The Soldier replies. No one knows what he said. Jinn laughs, the doors open, and they head into battle to die.
I LOVE THE legends. I love the tale of the Prince and his bride and the Robot and all their friends. This is not a fashionable position; my parents are very traditional and it drives them nuts. What did they expect? If our holy books had a Frog cleaving titans to pieces with his legendary Sadamune blade, I’d have paid more attention.
In their defence, they’ve always made a point of disapproving quietly. It’s the same for my work; when I first took an apprenticeship as a steam engineer my parents forbade it. How could their daughter labour in the heat, and immodestly clad at that? I broke a lot of delicate things and stormed out, never to return. It worked out well. We’re all closer now, though it still surprises me that I could be their child. They’re so mild; grateful just to be free of the endless wars of the Southern Continent and safe in the North. I’m short and round like my mother, however, and I inherited some of the green in my father’s eyes, so at least my parentage isn’t in doubt.
It’s a hard walk up to the famous bluff—the sheer cliffs give a wonderful view, and the tree is the oldest on the entire coast—and takes a while if you’re only five feet tall, counting your hair. I make do.
Grit goes with being an engineer; climbing to fit brass pipes makes every part of you strong, and knowing the city will get very cold if you stop makes you tough, if the occasional scalding hasn’t already. I have to give myself both time and a fine ploughman’s lunch to make the ascent before sunset, but make it I do. Every autumn, on the same day. I have the timing down to an art.
I’ll never get used to how fast the northern summer fades away. You sweat during the climb and shiver when you stop. I hate being cold, but cresting the ridge and catching sight of the bare tree with sunlight glinting through its skeletal branches is pure delight. This is the place where the time-travelling Prince and his friends made a pact to save the world from the Empress who tried to steal all of history for her own.
It’s a good story and parts of it are probably true. Not the Frog who refused to be kissed, obviously. There isn’t really any magic in the world, but there have always been people trying to control it. Anyway, wouldn’t the first woman to detonate gunpowder have been a sorceress? If I could take a peasant from the year 600 and show him what I do for a living four hundred years later, he’d think I was some sort of fire goddess.
So I ignore the chill and forget my blisters. Coming here is as close as I get to faith. Have you ever grieved without having lost anything, or at least nothing you knew you had? Explain that and you’ll explain this. I have no homeland, and being here gives me a sense of place.
Unfortunately, I won’t be alone. Someone is standing in my usual spot, precarious, right up on the point.
Tall and fair, he hears me with a start. He’s thin, and his left arm scarcely fills its sleeve. It’s been replaced with struts and cogs, which makes him a veteran. It hasn’t been so long since the North fought its own war to banish those who would rule without mercy or concern for others. I’d rather be by myself, if you can be alone in a place with so many spirits, but this year I’m out of luck. We assess each other awkwardly.
“Hello,” he says, “what’s your name?”
Not much of a conversationalist.
“Kassia Kamina,” I say.
He looks at me with momentary incomprehension. I have to explain where I was born often, even though a single glance at my amber skin ought to do it for me. While I explain, I realise that this man may not be well. He has a queer look, and he’s struggling to say something. Or not say it.
“Is that so?” He shakes his head with a kind of desperate negation, “I thought your name might be Jinn.”
That stops me. I stare at him and the wind quiets. Time fails to pass.
“Only my friends call me that,” I say.
It’s the best my mates can do pronouncing Djinn, which is what Southerners call desert spirits. I adore the nickname. I think it’s supposed to be mildly insulting—Djinn are capricious and wild—but giving you a pet name is how Northerners show they like you. I try not to feel either wild or capricious, but the idea that this man knows me is disconcerting.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He runs a distracted hand through his hair. I was right; this is a man on the edge. He stares at me with such intensity that I start thinking the smart move would be to turn around and take off.
Instead I stand my ground and stare back into his solitary blue eye. A hard patch covers the left one. He looks too young; most veterans are late in their middle age. He has a chilly gaze, but my eyes are little explosions of brown and green. Besides, I have two.
I win, and he’s the one who looks away. When I see his profile I try to imagine him with both eyes. I begin to see a resemblance, though I can hardly remember to whom. He looks like someone who’s about to slip and fall. A long time ago, I saw that look on the faces of other refugees. I’ve seen it on my father’s face. Never in the mirror, though.
“I’m sorry. I came here to meet someone. I was about ready to give it up.”
This actually makes me feel better about him. I have a soft spot for that kind of story.
“That’s romantic,” I say, and step past him toward the bluff. Blades of cold light slice through the clouds. The name was just a coincidence.
I stand in the same spot he did. He could push me off, I guess, but I don’t think he will. He’s just a little lost. That’s something I have seen in the mirror. “I’m sorry she didn’t come.”
“So am I,” he says, “but I didn’t really think she would. You look like you’ve been here before.”
“I’ve stood here every fall since I was old enough to ride the trains alone. I love old books, and this is a famous spot. The Prince and his one true love were reunited here, and the heroes made their pact under this tree. I start dreaming about them the instant the leaves turn. When I was young, I thought I’d meet my one true love here, too.”
“You want to meet a prince?” His tone is half-mocking.
“Not exactly,” I say. I might be blushing. How did we start with this? “The Prince isn’t my favourite character. I like the Frog, he makes me laugh, but my favourite is the Soldier who wears the Titan’s Arm and opens the door. I’d rather meet him.”
The veteran looks like a brass pipe hit with a hammer.
“It can’t be,” he says.
“What?”
“I said I came here to meet someone. I think it’s you.”
“We’ve never met,” I may sound angry. I usually can’t tell.
“We have. Not in this life, not even in this world, but we have.” His certainty is vast.
“Make sense,” I say, “or I’ll leave you here to wait for whoever you think I am.”
“If I do, you’ll think I’m insane,” he says.
“Fine,” I already knew that much, “jump off a cliff.”
“Wait,” he says, “please, wait. You said you had dreams about this bluff, about who you’d meet. Tell me the best one.”
I really, really ought to leave him alone with his hungry ghosts, but I’ve never been good at turning away. I sigh.
“I don’t dream about them, I dream I am one of them. I’m the Ifrit. I can fly. I’m small and fast and I burn. I’m with the Soldier. I know the legend says they all faced the Empress together, but we’re alone. We’re riding an elevator in the sunken city, which is silly because I can fly, and I’ve just saved his life, and I say, ‘do you still wish I’d been born human?’ and he says─”
“‘Yes,’ which makes you angry,” the veteran interrupts, “so you ask him ‘why?’”
Wonder starts a war with anger in my heart.
“And he says─”
“‘Because as it is I can’t touch you, and I already love you every other way there is.’”
The broken soldier really does reach out to touch me, then, and I raise a hand to stop him. Normally he’d get slapped for that, but he’s right. It’s not in the legend. No one knows what they said; it’s just what I dream they did. My heart thumps. We both need to pull away from the edge.
“Come and sit by the tree,” I tell him, because this is simply too strange to let go of, “and tell me how the story ends.”
THE DESTRUCTION OF the Mammon Machine is a cataclysm that should have been impossible. The Empress had power and will and all the time in the world. All the heroes had was each other; the Prince’s courage, the icy intelligence of his one true love. The Sadamune and the Robot’s guns. The Soldier’s arm and the Ifrit’s fire. None of them could have taken even the first step on their own but together, they topple an empire.
When the Prince strikes the final blow and takes his lover’s hand, every kink and fray in time draws itself inexorably straight, and they are thrown through the maelstrom one last time. They have changed history, written magic and immortality out of it, drawn truth and equality in.
The Soldier’s magical heart no longer beats, as inert as if it never had.
Jinn cannot escape the vortex of time no matter how hard she flies. The Ifrit fades, flakes away as she tries to hold onto the Titan Arm, her grasping fingers burning parallel grooves into its palm. The tears that fleck into space as Jinn loses her grip are molten pearls. She is sucked into the eye wall a half second before him. Every heartbeat is composed of two parts; push and pull, life and absence. The emptiness that pulls them apart is the end of magic itself.
I SHIVER. IT’S cold up here, and the end of the story you read in most libraries is a lot nicer than that. The heroes all go back to their own times, except for the Prince and his one true love, of course, who stay and get married.
“I can’t imagine myself doing that.”
“If you’d seen how the world ended you could,” the veteran says. “You did.”
“I’m sure I’d remember that,” I say, although I’ve had nightmares that contradict me. “Besides, there’s no apocalypse in the legend.”
“Of course not. The world didn’t end. The Empress never got a chance to get bored with it.”
That makes an illogical kind of sense.
“Well, at least in your version they still win,” I say.
“We did. Though dying for what you love is hardly the difficult part.”
SPAT FROM THE void, the Soldier opens his eyes with a start and says the Ifrit’s name. He is staring at a wall covered in names. There are flowers leaning against the base, and the monument stretches far in either direction. Citizens are walking along it, heads covered against the drizzle, fingers tracing for names as though they were despondent children drawing in sand. The rain is so fine it’s almost mist, but the peak of his uniform cap keeps his face a little dry.
He coughs, almost retches. Alive. Resurfacing in a world he helped create but has never seen, thrown back out of the well of time. A wave of residual anguish washes over him. He looks down at his hands. The right is calloused and strong, the hand he remembers. His left arm is loose in a drab regimental sleeve, the hand a skeletal claw supported by a crosshatching of fine wires and tiny cogs. It has three fingers and one thumb. When he flexes it there is a tiny creaking, the squeal of metal bathed in rain.
His heart would beat hard now, if he had one. The thought invades his mind and he reaches the living hand to his chest. Finds a hum under the brass buttons. Be still. Think. He breathes while his heart hisses along with the wind. Finally, he reaches up slowly to touch his left eye. Finds nothing but a hard patch. So that is beyond this new world, he thinks, and finds his good eye hazy with tears.
One of the memorial’s attendants, black-clad and carrying an umbrella stops by his side, glances at his uniform.
“Are you well, Captain?” he asks. A train clatters and exhales steam in the distance.
“Alone,” he says, “that’s all.”
I SIT UNDER the tree and listen. The veteran is an unconsciously talented narrator. He tells the story better than anyone I’ve ever heard, and the tale of waking up in a new world gives an ethereal sense of shifting currents in time. The grass trembles less than his voice, and when the Mammon Machine shudders so do I.
“Honestly, it never occurred to me that I’d survive,” he finishes, and the strangeness sets back in. “No soldier ever imagines what comes after war. I came here to stand on the edge and wait for you. I knew you wouldn’t come. I was sure that magic died with you. With us. We fell into the vortex less than a heartbeat apart and you beat me here by twenty years.”
“You really believe this happened.” I try to make this a question, fail.
“I do, and this is the second time you’ve shaken my faith,” he almost laughs, “another one of your habits. Don’t look at me like it’s so strange. Do you know why you come here? What exactly do you have faith in?”
The question curls my lips. Surprising bitterness.
“There is one God, one prophet, one world,” I say. The profession ends there, but I can’t stop myself; “one, or so they say. One sky and one earth and one life and one history. One of so many things I’m not sure I believe.”
He smiles. Really, this time.
“There you are,” he says, and I’m not sure if he means her or me.
JINN FINDS HERSELF, every morning, in the position of the sultan who must decide whether to kill the story-teller. As days pass on the long road to the Empress’ palace, she decides not to burn the Soldier.
It’s not an easy choice; the scales dip and rise, almost even. On one side he was, until recently, a servant of the same dark forces that nearly exterminated her entire species. On the other, he did his part to free her from her crystal cage, or at least failed to stop her. Balance. This isn’t really Jinn’s kind of dilemma, but it is better than being drained of her soul and turned into a lapel pin. She loves the rest of her companions, and the Frog’s accent makes her laugh. They accept what she is without fear. Around the campfires she starts for them, familiarity opens her heart, and she tries not to set anything important ablaze by accident.
Their friendship makes hiding from men in the age of technology a game, and watching the world end a call to arms. Jinn finds reason to believe in something, even if she isn’t sure what. She ignores the petty details of what they’ll destroy. What it is they haven’t said. The Empress and her machine are worse than the cage. Worthy of risk. Worthy of sacrifice. Worthy of her. There’s a difference between abandon and losing control.
I EXHALE AND there’s a hint of frost in the dying afternoon air. When I was young, I would pretend I was a dragon breathing smoke.
“The way you tell it, it’s not a love story anymore.”
“I think it is,” he says, “listen.”
THE HEROES TRAVEL to the distant past, even further back than the misty middle age of spirits that Jinn calls home. The Doctor, Jinn’s former captor, seems to have survived their first encounter. Just as well; he built the Mammon Machine, and might know how to break it. The Empress should never have let him out of her sight.
The men and women who inhabit the golden age that gave birth to sorcery understand magic the same way Jinn understands heat. Their art and science are indistinguishable, and even their ruins are cities in the sky.
Among them, perhaps for the first time in her life, Jinn feels at home. Courtiers blush and fawn over her hair rather than run to their huts to pray. They reveal the Doctor’s plan with the unconscious simplicity shared only by children and artists. He wants to reactivate the Titan of legend, give himself a new body that no one will ever be able to harm again.
When Jinn and the Prince and their friends discover him in the Titan’s mausoleum, it is already too late to stop the ancient golem’s resurrection.
“YOU’RE LEAVING SOMETHING out. We don’t live in a fairy tale and people don’t abandon everything they love to go running after the Evil Empress. No one sacrifices themselves for someone they just met. Why would you follow her? Why did she even let you?”
The soldier seems taken aback. Like he’s surprised that anything isn’t that simple. That he can’t just say it and make me believe him.
“Well,” he says, “you know how the Soldier got his arm.”
“From the dead Titan. They found it in the city in the sky. The evil Doctor who made the Empress her machine got there before them and tried to take control of it. During the battle, the Soldier was hurt and the Prince saved him with ancient magic.”
“Is that all the legend says?” He scowls.
“You’ve never read it?” Anger builds in me like steam.
“I’m not the reading type. Besides, they got it wrong.”
“So the Prince and the Frog didn’t cleave the Titan to pieces, then?”
“They did, but you’re right─something has been left out.”
THE DOCTOR BRINGS all of his cruel knowledge to bear in preparing for them. He knows the Titan is only almost invincible. He has to kill the Ifrit, who could heat its armour to the point of softness, electrocute the Frog, whose sword could break it, and confuse the Prince, the only one with the courage to try. He plans to accomplish all of this in a single stroke. Trust is his enemies’ primary weapon, and their only weakness.
“Ah Captain, we meet again,” the Doctor’s voice booms from his seat in the Titan’s breast. He has knelt to speak to them, left the plates of the golem’s chest open so they can hear him. “You have done well bringing them to me.”
Jinn’s fists clench into fireballs. Faith is not something she has ever pondered, but she finds hers shaken by the Doctor’s taunt. She vibrates with something that’s either rage or mind consuming anxiety. Maybe they’re the same thing.
They all glare at the Soldier. He can’t still be one of them, can he? Did he manoeuvre them here to end the quest, not complete it? It is the second time Jinn has tested what tiny patience she has watching him decide.
“I sometimes wish you’d been born human,” the Soldier says, almost grateful.
He shoots the Doctor in the same spot as the first time, low, and the trap goes off in his face. The Doctor hasn’t exposed himself just to talk. He has armed the Titan with some of the same nets the Soldier himself once used. Their electricity will serve equally to neutralize the Ifrit and the Frog. The Soldier glances back at Jinn. He owes her a life.
Everything changes. The salvo of crackling gossamer disintegrates the arm the Soldier raises to shield himself, one eye and, as it wraps itself about him, his heart.
Jinn experiences a sensation of profound cold. The siphonings don’t compare. Not even being torn through time leaves the same chill. As the incoherent madman closes himself into his new body, the Prince and his companions charge.
They dispatch the Titan together. As clever as ever, the Prince’s one true love reasons cold will serve just as well as heat. Her icy magic paralyzes the Titan while the Frog leaps from pillar to pillar and the Robot throws the Prince high into the air. They come down at angles, flashing blades carving a deep cross into the armour over the Titan’s breast. The hulk thrashes and staggers.
The Ifrit flies a wide arc, gathering momentum and incandescent fury. Her friends have marked the spot for her. The Titan’s heart. There are few limits to what she can do, but this might be one.
Jinn strikes the Titan like a meteorite, blasting herself through the weakness with a sound like cosmic hammers striking steel. For an infinitesimal instant there’s stillness, then the Titan blows apart at the joints in a concussive holocaust.
Impact. Rebirth. Save him or fail. Live or don’t. Ascend, or fall, or both. The Ifrit corkscrews wildly from the Titan’s sundered spine.
Jinn skids to a halt on cold stone. Her eyes open and she coughs up little clots of molten spit. She regains the air, and as her agony fades, exultation remains. It may never leave. Her friends look up as one to watch the Titan fall.
Afterwards, while the Ifrit flits about in anxious spirals, the denizens of the golden age save the Soldier. They are the Empress’ citizens, theoretically; prototypes of the idle elite who will enjoy leisurely immortality as her subjects, dreaming away centuries under a corrupt aegis. They delay death the way fate delays trains.
They return his sight, give him a magical heart, and take one of the Titan’s arms to replace the one he lost. They do this not in gratitude, but because every dream is too precious to waste.
“SO THE GOLDEN age was true.” This fills me with hope. I love what I do and who I am, but it always feels like a lot of work. I enjoy the idea that there was some point when it was all easy, that there was a garden before the flood. I also like the Ifrit blowing everything up; the story is better that way.
“Entirely true. They stopped time to save me. They gave me a ten-thousand-year-old arm that was as tall as my body, and I swung it as though it weighed nothing.”
“How much did it weigh?”
“Everything, as far as I can tell.”
I’m getting sucked in. The legend has sharp hooks. I feel angry for so easily abandoning objectivity, then angrier still for being mad at something that makes me happy. Does that make any sense?
“We didn’t all fight because we believed in the Prince and his quest. I see the Ifrit and the Soldier as a pair, like the Frog and the Robot. I think he did what he did for her.”
He’s having trouble talking about this like it’s just a story.
“Jinn inspired that much loyalty in him?” It feels odd to say her name the same way I say mine.
“She did,” he says. “You did. From the very first time we met.”
“Would you stop saying ‘you?’” I say, though I’m not sure I want him to. Not sure it would be accurate if he did.
JINN HATES BEING confined. Born flying, it is impossible for her to imagine just how much she’ll loathe being dragged to earth until someone locks her in a cage.
Captivity is the history of spirits like Jinn, of her gender, of her species. Endless flight from those who wouldn’t let them live in peace. Less is written about what happens when you give them a chance, even the shadow of a chance, to break free.
The Soldier rounds the corner to a crowd of grim faces. The atonal disharmony of annihilation booms at his back. Everything behind him is burning; men, an empire’s certainty, his own faith. The cacophony sets every one of his fellows on edge.
“The Ice Wolf escaped,” he roars, “get the flamethrowers!”
Something far worse than noise pursues him. Jinn carves her way through the factory with pyroclastic finality. She turns her prison into a fountain of ash.
The Empress’ men hear the monster come. As it arcs into sight they bathe it in fire. Its eyes are dark embers lost in the flames, and for a moment they think they’re winning. Only when the liquid blaze starts to spin and weave does fear quicken their hearts. Not for long. The Ifrit burns them until their cries echo even in the smoke.
Jinn’s rage has the straightforward trajectory of sparks falling into oil. The conflagration scarcely satiates her soul-deep craving for the immediate and total immolation of everything that has ever hurt her. The sweet release of it cools her aspect just enough to grant the Soldier provisional permission to live. He lied for her, after all. It’s something.
They escape on the ore carts the wretched facility once used to supply its chambers with prey. Spring wind rushes past and makes Jinn’s hair flicker and spark.
“Well, you avenged your brothers and sisters. What about me? You’ve burned everyone else.”
“Not everyone,” Jinn says, and her breath shimmers the air, “not yet.”
She calculates, balancing the complexity of what she is owed against what she has given, against what has been taken away. Before she arrives at an answer, the cart finally creaks to a stop.
Behind them, in the distance, a column of smoke billows skyward like the plume of a volcano. On the platform is a handsome young prince, a beautiful girl in pure white, and a giant talking frog dressed as a knight.
With infinite caprice, and perhaps to delay decision, Jinn abandons her newly won freedom and takes on a hopeless quest instead. Mutely, the Soldier takes his place at her back.
ON IMPULSE I take both of his hands and turn a professional eye on the left. The workmanship is excellent, but it isn’t magic. Nothing is. “It seems a shame to have lost all that.”
He talks to hide how uncomfortable he is.
“Perhaps, but everything said about the Empress’ thirst for power is true. What she wanted to do with magic makes me glad we destroyed the machine. This world feels like an empty cage most of the time, but immortality doesn’t bring corruption, it is corruption.”
I run my fingers along the intricate gears. What does it mean to believe in magic? Not my kind of question, but try it anyway. That world either is or it isn’t. Will or won’t be. Was or wasn’t, though I’m leaning toward was. Soaring toward it. One day someone will use a machine to fly, and I know how they’ll feel. What do you think the difference between knowing and believing is?
“You’re saying that you are him. Not that you’re like him. And that I am her. Literally.”
“Yes.”
Now we’re at the heart of it. It’s time to choose, though I don’t think I get any more choice than the sun does when it rises. You can’t believe in just part of someone. Love is everything or nothing at all. We’re as powerless before it as paper before flame. The question, I have come to think, is not what will convince me that the legend is true, that I am part of it, but whatever convinced me that I wasn’t.
That decided, I laugh at him.
The sun has nearly set, and this would be a good place to stop. There is more to the story, though, and we both know it. I know how it begins, but I want to hear him say it.
THE IFRIT TRIES to remember her name. She awakens each day as a test subject, a sacrifice, a prisoner in time. She has come to understand what it means to be fuelled by hate. The scientists and academicians of this late age certainly don’t know how to feed her, but that isn’t the point of the facility. It is not a zoo. None of them are going to make it out of this colossal lattice of metal and stone alive. Magic is weakening in the Empress’ iron epoch, and she bends time itself to get her hands on what remains.
Today the screaming is canine. Skoll and Jinn never got along as young ones, both temperamentally and elementally unsuited, but the Ice Wolf is still her kin. There ought to be some grand realization in the howling but Jinn can’t hear it. The idea of dying without figuring it out makes her angry.
Worse, she will apparently soon be stripped of even the mournful dignity of a burnt offering; she’s part of a tour. The Doctor, the lab-coated monster of her nightmares, mounts the stairs with two other men. A soldier with cold blue eyes and his adjutant. She would know those eyes at the end of the world, but he doesn’t recognize her immediately.
The Imperial academician is in an expository mood.
“Well, Captain. I have shown you every aspect of this facility but it has been merely an introduction, a prelude to your admission into the highest realms of the empire. You alone captured one of these magical creatures single handedly; your reputation precedes you!”
The Soldier looks seasick, dazed. Summoned by the Empress herself, he had expected something else. Well, this exactly, if he’s being honest with himself, just not like this. He is a man without doubt, but touring the facility, doubt coalesced around him like the condensation that coats the infinite brass pipes. He faces the consequences of his victories, the aftermath of glory.
The gravity of what he’s done bores into him when the Doctor shows him a siphoning. A giant beast, like a dog with a coat of crystalline frost for fur, is suspended in one of a hundred crystal tubes, barely twitching as current flows through it.
“This one is close to finished,” the Doctor says.
The Soldier likes dogs. The Ice Wolf twitches as vials fill with something luminous. Mounting the stairs to the next demonstration, the Doctor’s speech flows with the confidence of a young river.
“Everything we are is born here. These animals provide the power that fuels our citadel, our Guardians, our empire. Even the charges in your pistol would be impossible without their by-products. Magic is a resource we cannot neglect; it is far better than water or wood or electricity! It is wasted in them, as are so many things in nature, and we must use it to the maximum. It is our manifest destiny!”
They mount steel stairs to Jinn’s platform. Inestimable lengths of tubing carry spurts of beautiful liquid all around them. At the top is another crystal prison, too large for the little creature that inhabits it. The tower of the soldier’s faith is leaning, but doesn’t fall until he hears the Ifrit speak.
“You,” she says.
The Soldier’s face is a mask.
“This one in particular is an Ifrit, or Creatura Flammidemia, if you want to be perfectly accurate.”
They scrutinize her. Her skin has the glow and texture of brazier coals. Instead of hair, she has a luxurious mane of slow burning fire. Her shape is small and broad-hipped. Clearly female to the Doctor, uncomfortably so to the soldiers. She is floating an inch above the brushed metal base of the cage. She rises a little as they approach.
“Look, Captain. It remembers you. Interesting. Did you know that when they die, they leave behind gems? Living essence. It is my greatest discovery; there are many uses for it.” The Doctor laughs fatly, “Including the creation of the Badge of Order. No matter what your military rank, there is no greater promotion than this. Destroy this thing and join us. We need a man of your courage and loyalty.”
“You drain the life out of them,” the Soldier says, “and then turn them into decorations?” His face is ashen. The Doctor finally notices. Even now, Jinn feels a faint trill of irritation. There is no limit to how much time a human will waste. As if there was an infinite supply.
“Captain, the extraction of magic from these creatures causes no harm. Their cries are the squeaking of springs, the clicking of clockwork. The concept of soul is a pretension of the flesh. It perishes. The empire we build with these stones will last forever. Courage, love, hope, honour; all these things die,” he taps the glass and the Ifrit flinches, “don’t they?”
Jinn knows she ought to grovel, so she roars. The Doctor flinches in his turn, then angrily depresses a lever. Energy courses from a bulb at the top of the chamber. Jinn stretches and writhes. The crystal gives her screams polytonal resonance. After a moment the surge stops and the doctor taps again.
“Courage, love, hope, and honour all die,” he says again, “don’t they?”
“Yes,” Jinn says, and her voice would be less beautiful without pain, “but hope dies last.”
Everything slows, like time won’t pass. The look she gives the Soldier is not anger or hate, which are easy for a man to dismiss. It’s scorn.
“Your badge will be red, I suspect,” the Doctor fingers his own with great complacency. “Fitting.”
“It is,” the Soldier says. “Thank you for this demonstration, Academician. I learned a great deal.”
It is only when the Doctor sees the agony of spirit in the Soldier’s eyes that he truly begins to worry. “What’s wrong? This is a singular honour.”
“Wrong? We are creating an empire founded on death, not immortality. These things aren’t killing our country, you are.”
I WAS WRONG. I don’t want to hear it. It makes me feel sick.
“Stop. I know the rest,” I say.
“You don’t. It isn’t in the legend. It can’t be.”
“I do. It wasn’t the Empress who travelled back to the dark ages in search of magic. She didn’t put me in that cage. You did.”
“You remember,” the Soldier says.
“I believe. It’s the same thing. Were you ever able to tell her why?”
“There are no reasons, other than that I was following my orders.”
The sun has set.
“Did I forgive you?” I say. He looks surprised, as though he expected me to ask something else, as if there was anything else.
“I don’t know,” he says, “but all the evil I did, I did in some way because of you. All the good, because of you.”
THE IFRIT KNEW the Soldier at once, more deeply than he can conceive. Up on the bluff, he used the glowing nets to catch her and so many of her brothers and sisters. She listened to his troops call him a man without fear. Jinn might have found some satisfaction in watching him fall apart, but there’s too much pain to care.
What she has sensed is a chance. This miserable human can make right what he’s done. She watches him. He closes his eyes to her captivity and walks away.
Jinn has long since accepted that there is no way out. Has listened to her fellows cry in the night. Has taken her turns under the siphon. She hasn’t any tears left and wouldn’t shed them for him if she did. She tried using them to burn her way out. It didn’t work. She hammers her tiny fists against the concave crystal.
“Coward!”
The soldier puts a hand on the rail to steady himself.
“Turn away then, fool!” The Doctor screams, “turn away if you don’t have the stomach!”
When the Soldier answers, the tone of his voice makes Jinn look up. She sees total loss in his posture, and understands what she has taken from him. Only faith, not courage. Good.
“It’s funny you should put it that way,” he says.
The Doctor has scarcely voiced the obvious question when the Soldier’s coat billows outward like a sail catching the wind. A crashing report careens between the brass tubes. He has fired his pistol without turning, close to his body. The Doctor collapses as if the strings supporting him have been cut.
The Soldier operates his weapon with the fluidity of an automaton. He breaks the gun open as he turns, and his steps follow the path of the red-hot casing that jumps from the breech.
“Captain?” his adjutant asks, dumbstruck, half reaching for his own weapon.
“There is no reason to follow orders if you cannot trust in their justice,” he says, and levels the weapon again, “I’m sorry.”
As the second shot fades, the Soldier turns back to the Doctor to find him gone. He looks at the pistol in his hand. Brass, ironwood, ornate locks and levers. He can’t bring himself to look at her.
The Soldier turns his gaze from Jinn the way children shy from the sun. He touches the controls of the infernal machine.
“If I let you out of there,” he says, “are you going to kill me?”
“Yes,” Jinn says, “I’m going to burn every single one of you.”
“Fine,” the Soldier smiles in spite of himself, “but I can help you escape. Wait until then.”
THE DAY IS an afterglow. Faint smells catch the wind and carry the city. They were alien, once, but now they just remind me I’m hungry. I rise and pull him up with me.
“Walk with me down the hill. We’ll eat.”
In a book, it would be the soldier who takes the girl’s hand. Instead I drag him down the hill and away from the bluff. The reunion is the last chapter of the story. We keep walking, finding our way carefully so as not to slip in the fading light.
I have scales to balance, but he can help me find home; I can wait until then. Actually, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve already decided how the legend ends, but that’s only my second favourite part. I like beginnings, and the feeling that you never know where the path will end.
HIGH ON THE bluff, cold wind courses between cutting edges of light.
“You’re a slave,” the Ifrit says, and her voice is laden with rage and the faintest note of melancholy.
“You’re an animal, and your time is up,” the Soldier re-joins.
“We’ll see whose time has passed, child of man,” Jinn says, and her smile belittles the sunset, “we shall soon see.”