I could feel Alma weighing her decision. ‘You ask for a great deal.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the problem with downsizing, isn’t it? It gets awkward when you have to hire the same people back.’ I paused. ‘With hindsight, it would have saved everyone an awful lot of trouble if you’d just convinced Levistus to leave me alone.’
‘Levistus did not make a habit of taking advice,’ Alma said. I felt the futures settle. ‘All right, Verus. You’ll get what you ask for. But only if Drakh doesn’t leave that shadow realm alive.’
‘Fair enough. I imagine you won’t be taking part in the attack?’
‘Of course not.’
‘In that case, I doubt we’ll be seeing much more of each other.’
‘No. We won’t.’
I deactivated the focus and walked over to Talisid. ‘Did you get all that?’ I asked. ‘The armour’s for Luna; the bullet ward’s for me. We’ll need them for tonight.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’
‘Good.’
Talisid turned to go.
‘Oh, and Talisid?’
Talisid looked back.
‘When I set that trap for your team in Hyperborea, I picked a deep shadow realm that would leave you all unavailable for a few hours,’ I said. ‘I could just as easily have picked one that would have erased you from existence. I chose not to. Call it professional courtesy.’ I paused. ‘Try anything like that again, and I won’t extend the same courtesy. It’s nothing personal. It’s just, well, I can’t keep letting people off with a warning. You understand?’
‘Yes,’ Talisid said. ‘I do.’ He gave me a nod. ‘Verus.’
Talisid left. I watched him go.
5
I returned to the Hollow to find Karyos awake, sitting cross-legged in her clearing. ‘You slept late,’ I said as I walked over.
‘Recovering the memories was difficult.’
Karyos was reborn less than a month ago, and she still doesn’t remember most of her past lives. If she needs to recall something, she uses a meditation ritual. I guess when you live as many lifetimes as a hamadryad, keeping track of all those memories is difficult.
I sat down in front of Karyos. ‘To understand the ritual,’ Karyos began without preamble, ‘you must understand how jinn die.’
I nodded.
‘Jinn are immortal,’ Karyos said. ‘They can take a body, but only as a vessel. As clothing. When their bodies were killed – back when they had them – the jinn’s essence, their soul and animating spirit, would drift, discorporated. In time, other jinn would give them form again by performing a ritual of rebirth. The elements of the world around them were sculpted into a body. The jinn would wake, and begin its new life.’
When I’d asked Sonder about jinn, he’d told me about history and war. When Richard had brought it up, he’d talked about armies and power. Now I was getting a third perspective.
‘Jinn were connected to the elements of our world. They did not fear death – the word has no meaning for them. What they feared was something else. The void. If they were to lose their connection to our world, they would be cast into the space between. Somehow, mages learned of this. They came to believe that they had found the jinn’s weakness.’ Karyos was silent for a moment. ‘Suleiman’s ritual was designed to sever a jinn’s connection with our world. With that link gone, discorporation was no longer a drifting sleep. It was an eternal nightmare.’
‘And that was what happened to all of them,’ I said.
‘The lesser jinn were reduced,’ Karyos said. ‘Their thoughts and consciousness degraded until they were little but husks. Those creatures that attacked us two days ago . . . they were living beings once. Perhaps they might even have been among the ones I spoke to, when I was young. If they were, they did not recognise me. Nor I them.’ Karyos stared into the distance for a moment, lost in her memories. ‘The greater jinn retained their consciousness. After a fashion. The void contains . . . entities. They do not live or exist in time as we understand it. But they can affect those they touch.’
‘Well, that’s incredibly creepy,’ I said. ‘You think that marid was affected?’
Karyos shrugged. ‘It wanted for the humans of this world to be made extinct even before being banished to the void. From your point of view, I’m not sure it makes much difference.’
‘Fair point.’
‘In the waning days of the war, the jinn attempted to revive those of their kin that had been banished,’ Karyos said. ‘Working together, they were able to modify the rebirth ritual. Instead of creating a new body, they learned how to summon a banished jinn into a human host. Unlike a normal contract, the host’s consent was not required.’
‘And that wasn’t enough to win them the war?’
‘The ritual was too slow, and by the time they had fully developed it, too many jinn had been bound. The problem lay in the amount of energy required to bring a conscious mind through the veil. Mindless and near-mindless creatures, such as jann, could be summoned easily, but greater jinn were far more difficult. The sultan and its generals came to believe that if the veil was weakened in a specific area, this problem could be solved.’
‘That’s the ritual that Richard’s talking about,’ I said. ‘So what, the sultan tried it back then and it didn’t work?’
‘The Council forces discovered the plan, and attacked and crushed the remaining jinn before the ritual’s completion.’
‘And now the same thing’s happening again,’ I said. I thought for a minute. ‘You said the ritual weakened the veil in an area. What sort of area? Like a shadow realm?’
‘Perhaps,’ Karyos said. ‘It may be that the ritual would not work in our world. Perhaps a smaller, separated reality is necessary.’
‘Would explain why she went after Sagash’s shadow realm. Well, that and for personal reasons.’ I frowned. ‘Wait. The ritual affects an area?’
Karyos nodded.
‘Richard said the ritual was supposed to affect Anne,’ I said. ‘It’d give her the ability to summon greater jinn fast.’
‘Effectively.’
‘It doesn’t modify Anne to act as some sort of conduit, or something like that?’
Karyos shook her head. ‘I do not fully understand how the ritual works, but I’m quite sure that would be impossible. No living body would be able to withstand it. And even if it could, the effect would fall apart as soon as she moved. It would have to be anchored to an area.’
I kept frowning.
‘Alex?’ Karyos asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said absently. When Richard had described the ritual at the meeting, he’d implied that the way it worked was by affecting Anne.
It wasn’t a big difference in practical terms. Instead of making new jinn-bearers on the spot, Anne would have to knock them out and drag them back to her shadow realm first. It would make things harder, but not that much harder. But if it was such a minor detail, why had Richard lied about it? Had he been trying to make the ritual sound more dangerous than it really was to pressure the Council to take action?
Or maybe Richard didn’t know everything. Maybe he’d just made a mistake.
I considered both explanations. Neither felt quite right.
Karyos was waiting patiently. ‘Can you think of any reason Richard would want us to think the ritual was designed to affect a person?’ I asked.
Karyos shook her head. ‘I don’t understand how your master thinks.’