‘Perhaps you will see, before the day is over. What do you make of the Banu Sasan?’
Abu smiles. ‘I grew up here.’
Tawaddud blinks. ‘That is a story I would like to hear.’
‘Too long to be told on an afternoon walk, I’m afraid. I do not speak of it often: it is difficult enough for me to deal with the muhtasib families without being a Soarez, Ugarte, Gomelez or Uzeda.’ Abu spreads his hands. ‘No matter how many gogols my mutalibun bring back from the desert.’
‘So, in your position, a wise man would be looking for the hand of a younger daughter of a muhtasib House? Even one with a . . . less than perfect reputation?’
Abu looks down. ‘I had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon with a beautiful woman without discussing such things.’
There is such sadness in his human eye that Tawaddud almost tells him the truth: that he should never marry a girl who loves only monsters. Then the wound left by Duny’s smile stings again. I am going to show Father who I really am. But not like she thinks.
Tawaddud touches Abu’s shoulder lightly.
‘You are right. Let us leave marriages and Houses up on the Shards, where they belong. Here, no one cares who we are. And that is one reason why I come here.’
As always, Tawaddud sets up her practice next to a defaced Sobornost statue – a bearded man with a machinist’s tools, now covered in athar scrawls and patches of wildcode.
As Abu watches, Tawaddud unfolds her stall from her bag: components that open up into spindly structures like giant insect legs. She turns them into a tent with a small table and a bed. She spreads out her gear and the jinni bottles. Almost as soon as she is finished, the patients start coming.
They line up outside the tent and, one by one, Tawaddud does the best she can. Most are simple hauntings, easily dispelled. Actual wildcode infections are more difficult but, fortunately, the ones today are not too bad. Merely a boy who has glowing v-shaped dashes all over his skin, chasing each other, moving in flocks like birds. He claims they are ancient symbols of victory and would like to keep them, but Tawaddud points out that they will grow and take over his skin entirely.
She studies the boy with athar vision, gently cupping his face.
‘You have been in the desert again,’ Tawaddud chides. The boy twitches, but Tawaddud grips his face firmly. ‘Let me see.’
She takes one of the little jinn bottles from her belt, opens it and lets the software creature out, a cloud of sharp triangles in the athar.
‘I thought I told you not to go there,’ she says.
‘A man needs to have a dream, my lady, and the dreams are in the desert,’ the boy says.
‘I see you are going to be a poet next. Hold still.’ The little jinn eats the wildcode in the boy’s frontal lobe. ‘This might hurt a little. But if you don’t stay out of the way of the mutalibun, you are not going to be much use to anyone.’
‘I’m too fast for them to catch me,’ the boy says, wincing. ‘Like Mercury Ali.’
‘He wasn’t fast enough in the end: no one runs away from the Destroyer of Delights for ever.’
‘Except the flower prince,’ the boy says. ‘The thief who never dies.’
In the afternoon they bring her the ghul.
It is the wife of one of the sapphire acrobats, a lean, muscled woman with dark curls in a tight sobor-fabbed dress. The acrobat leads her by the hand. She follows him like a child, an empty look in her eyes.
Tawaddud sits her down in the tent. ‘Can you tell me your name?’ she asks gently.
‘Chanya,’ the girl says.
‘Her name is Mari,’ says the acrobat gruffly.
Tawaddud nods. ‘Do you know where she got it from?’
The acrobat spits and hands Tawaddud a smooth, transparent sheet. ‘Found them in her tent,’ he says. ‘Burned them. Kept one to show you.’
Tawaddud glances at the page of dense text. The words dance in her eyes, and pull her in.
Before the Cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer’s son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun – the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hearts of men.
The story he loved best was the story of the Lost Jannah of the Cannon, the sacred place guarded by the Aun, the underground city where the first uploaded souls dreamt and turned in their sleep.
‘Take me with you,’ he would say. ‘I will carry your burdens. I will rake through sand for jinn jars. No task will be too low for me if you will only let me be a mutalibun.’
But the old mutalibun scratched their beards and shook their heads and said no, never explaining why. One night, he got an ancient one to talk by spending a day’s pay on honey wine.
‘You want too much,’ the old man said, a sad smile on dried lips. ‘A mutalibun does not want. He finds, he takes, but he does not want. Jinni and lost jannahs are less to him than dust. Cast asides your desires, boy, and maybe then you will be a mutalibun.’
By day, the boy wired, made paths for the jinni to travel – the cable reel a constant burden on his back, his arms and shoulders aching – but he also thought. Surely, the old men were tired, tired of the sapphire roughness of their skin, lost in the desert dreams that the wildcode brings. Even his father with his small dreams had taken him to the spiderwoman of al’Qala’a to receive her gifts so he could climb higher, clinging to walls with the tiny spikes in his palms and feet.
Surely you had to want to succeed, to climb higher than others? The more he thought about the old man’s words, the more the desert burned in his mind, like the sun up on the Shards, beating on his brow.
He bedded a tavern girl with promises and the hungry gaze of his dark eyes and promised her jinn rings and thinking dust that would glitter in her hair like stars. And so she became his accomplice: she slipped a spiderwoman’s drug into the drink of a tired mutalibun, took his Seal armour and rukh stick and gave them to the young man. And so, in the dawn, he donned the garments of the mutalibun and joined a group of the treasure-hunters at the gate of Bab in the dawn, heading out to the desert.
Now, back then, even more so than now, the mutalibun were a taciturn lot. They save their voices and speak with signs, if at all. Even their hunter jinni are silent, shadows that come out of their bottles and pursue dead dreams at night, like dark gusts of wind with teeth. So the young man was taken as one of their comrades, just another hunched figure in the long walk to the mountains of the rukh. But he almost gave himself away when they stopped to rest on the first night, in a glade of windmill trees: he tried to open his water flask before the leader did. A dark look from another mutalibun saved him.
But his dreams drove him onward, and all around the wildcode desert listened.
The city he had been searching was there, suddenly, the Jannah of the Cannon, shining like a jewelled dream. But it seemed that the mutalibun would simply pass it by, and so he made signs to the leader to change direction. The old man just shook his head. And so the young man strode out on his own, leaving the column, and entered the city, certain that only he had the courage to lay claim to the secrets within.
Walking the streets alone, he felt like a king. There were jinn machines from a lost age, virtual worlds you could enter with a thought; machine bodies that jinni used to wear, more beautiful than any love-slave he had ever seen. They called out to him and he took his mutalibun’s tools to cut out and bottle their souls.