“So did they bind them into items too?”
Sonder shook his head. “No, they discussed that but rejected it. Too many worries that anyone who got hold of one of the generals could use it to free the sultan. They were banished instead.”
“They didn’t just kill them?”
“Well, they couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Sonder looked at me in surprise. “Jinn can’t be killed. You didn’t know?”
I shook my head.
“It’s because they’re partly divine.” Sonder settled back into his chair; he was in his element now. “I mean, ‘divine’ is the wrong word, there’s nothing sacred about them, but the people who wrote about them back then were a lot less rational about these things. A better model is that jinn exist in two different states. They have a physical form that exists inside space-time, and a nonphysical form that exists outside it. That was how the binding ritual could work. It just remapped their nonphysical state from one body to another.”
I frowned as I thought about that. “It was that easy?”
“Well, it took a lot of research to develop.”
“I didn’t mean easy to do. What effect did it have on the jinn?”
“Well, they were still around. And they could still grant wishes.”
“I mean in terms of what it was like for them.”
“Oh.” Sonder shrugged. “I don’t think anybody knows.”
Arachne had told me that the binding process had harmed the jinn, filling them with hatred or driving them to madness. She hadn’t explained why. “You said the jinn’s nonphysical states existed outside space-time,” I said. “So it was their physical forms that tethered them to our conception of time and space. Right?”
“Well, yes, in layman’s terms.”
“So switching their physical forms . . . would that mean that while they were in between the two, their consciousness wouldn’t have a temporal anchor? So they wouldn’t experience time in the same way as us at all?”
“Probably,” Sonder said. “I mean, you’re talking about the infinity point hypothesis, right?”
“The what?”
“You know, from Schulte?”
The futures shifted, and I paused to look at the change. The Keeper team hunting me had managed to get a first-stage fix on my signature. They’d have to do a second pass to narrow down my location, but just gating wouldn’t be enough to throw them off anymore. I had maybe five or six minutes.
“Alex?”
“Sorry. I’m not very familiar with his work.”
“Well, you know how all of those attempts for mages to transfer their consciousness into external housings never seem to work, right?” Sonder said. “And it’s not just here, pretty much every Light Council across the globe has a history of trying it. Golems, simulacra, clones, they never seem to take. Either the mind doesn’t jump, or they come out insane. Anyway, Schulte’s hypothesis was that it’s our physical body that allows our consciousness to experience time in a sequential way. Without a physical tether, our consciousness still exists, but it doesn’t occupy any position in space-time. The problem with all of those transference rituals was that no matter how they were designed, there was an infinitesimally small period during the jump where the transferring consciousness wasn’t tethered to their new body or their old body. Everyone else would perceive that moment as only a tiny fraction of a second, but without an anchor, the transferring consciousness could theoretically experience it as any length of time.”
A chill went through me. “You mean they could experience something that felt like thousands of years? With no sensory input or feedback?”
Sonder nodded. “Hence the insanity. That’s the theory anyway. It’s why nobody tries transferring their mind into a golem anymore.”
“So the same thing could have happened to those jinn.”
“Well, it would explain why they were so uncooperative.”
I was thinking about what the jinn in the monkey’s paw had said. Between body and seal, we were outside. A blink of an eye and a thousand years. What would it be like, to be shut out from the world in total sensory deprivation for a thousand years? Jinn wouldn’t experience it the same way as humans, but it couldn’t be good.
How would you survive something like that? You could do mental exercises, training your magical abilities in the way I’d trained in those long months when I was a prisoner in Richard’s mansion. Or you could focus on something, some goal or ideal, something greater than yourself to give you something to cling to during the endless years. The marid within the monkey’s paw had chosen the binding law of the contract. The sultan marid . . . what would it have chosen?
At the time of its binding, it had been leading its species in a war against mages. That would have been its goal.
Eternal war. I shivered.
“What is it?” Sonder asked. “You keep spacing out.”
“Little distracted. Sorry.” I rose to my feet, checking the futures. Only a minute or so left. “Sonder? One last thing. The jinn that weren’t bound into items. Can they still be summoned?”
Sonder nodded. “By the higher-order jinn, yes. That’s how jinn-possession subjects can pull off summoning rituals so easily.”
“So could the sultan resummon any other jinn of lesser rank than him? Including those ifrit?”
“I hope not.” Sonder looked worried. “It’s bad enough dealing with one of them.”
“Yeah,” I said. The futures clicked. Somewhere in a Council facility, the Keepers hunting me had just learned my exact location. “Well, time to go. Thanks for the help.”
Sonder tensed, probably wondering what I was going to do. I gave him a nod and walked out.
I shut the door of the flat behind me and started down the stairs. Mentally, I was cataloguing futures, calculating the Keeper team’s next move. Right now, they’d be cross-referencing my location with GPS data and their own records and learning that I was at Sonder’s flat. Next, they’d ping Sonder’s locator and confirm that he was there as well. From that point they had two choices. They could decide that Sonder was now an additional suspect and needed to be brought in. In that case, they’d call in more reinforcements, deploy teams to surround the area, get ready to move in with maximum force.
The other possibility was that they’d decide that Sonder was innocent and that I was an intruder, in which case the first thing they’d do would be to contact him directly. When he told them that I’d just left, they’d be faced with a dilemma. They could pull the trigger, gate in, and scramble to try to catch me before I got away, but they’d have little chance of catching me and they knew it. That just left them with one last option for tracking me before I got out of range . . .
From above me, I heard Sonder’s door, followed by the sound of feet hurriedly descending the stairs.
I sighed inwardly. They could get Sonder to slow me down. Sometimes knowing the future isn’t much fun.
Sonder came racing around the last flight of steps and caught himself as he saw me standing at the bottom. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Uh . . . ,” Sonder said.
I looked at him, eyebrows raised.
Sonder had just started to open his mouth to speak when there was a shift in the futures and he paused, the movement so slight that you wouldn’t have noticed unless you were watching for it. It wasn’t a long pause. Just long enough for someone speaking into his ear over a concealed link to suggest a cover story. “Don’t use the front door,” Sonder said. “The Council are monitoring it.”