The Fractal Prince (29 page)

The Observatory galleries are a historical relic, large spherical spaces, with pentagonal windows, and a circular balcony bisecting them. Secret Names are engraved in gold on every surface. Mosaics guide the eye to the observation windows. The harnesses where the muhtasib used to sit with their glasses and athar telescopes are still here, but now only wooden life-sized dolls are suspended from them.

The Councillors wait for them in front of the large pentagonal windows that open to the wildcode desert, a jagged landscape of fallen Sobornost technology, now overgrown with windmill trees and nameless plants, chaotic geometry broken only by the rails of soul trains, heading towards the mountains in the north.

There are six of them. Cassar’s face is like stone. He is flanked by Lucius Aguilar, his old supporter, dour and thin-faced. A jinn thought-form hovers around a plain Council jinn jar.
Mr Sen
. House Soarez is represented by a short-haired woman, Councilwoman Idris. Ayman Ugarte, a powerful man whose face is covered in Seal tattoos, gives Tawaddud a hard stare.

And then there is Veyraz, Veyraz ibn’ Ad, of House Uzeda. Her husband. When he sees Tawaddud, his eyes widen. He gives her a look that she has been dreading for four years, full of hate and jealousy. Duny takes her place next to their father, who nods at Tawaddud and then wrenches himself up from his chair laboriously, spreading his arms.

‘We have been chosen by the Council to question you, Tawaddud Gomelez. You are accused of assisting the jinn Zaybak, also known as the Axolotl, in the murders of Councilwoman Alile Soarez and the Sobornost envoy Sumanguru, of the Turquoise Branch. This is not to establish your guilt, which is already apparent to the Council, but to present the people of Sirr with a full account of your crimes before the Aun.’ His face is red. ‘Before we begin questioning, you may speak.’

Tawaddud swallows. Her mouth is dry.
No more pleasant lies
, she thinks.

‘We are fools, all of us, all of Sirr,’ she says. ‘We are selling our blood for wealth, and think it makes us rich. But we are pale and tired and weak—’

‘Are you mocking the heritage of your own House, woman?’ shouts Veyraz.

Cassar holds up his hand. ‘Let her speak.’

‘But she is clearly—’

‘Let her speak!’

Tawaddud looks down. She feels their eyes on her. The speech she rehearsed for so long in her cell feels muddled and empty.

‘We cannot live without blood. We cannot survive on empty wealth, thinking we can make Sirr-in-the-sky live again. There is another power in the sky now, and its thirst will never be quenched.

‘I am not guilty of the crimes I am accused of. But there are things this council needs to hear, and I will leap from the Shard and embrace the desert, if that will make you listen.’

Her father looks at her, with a strange look of anguish on his face. Suddenly, Tawaddud remembers where she saw that expression. They were cooking together, on one of the long quiet evenings after her mother died. Instead of following the recipe, she put in a liberal mixture of spices, cumin and marjoram, because it felt right.

‘That is what you need to get food to do, to tell a story,’ Cassar said. ‘Even if you need to use a few forbidden spices.’

Duny is looking at her too. For a moment, Tawaddud remembers what the city looked like through her eyes, a muhtasib’s eyes.

To tell a story
. The circle and the square. No wonder it seemed so familiar.

‘He used the city,’ she whispers. She looks at the Council. ‘I can prove that Abu Nuwas the gogol merchant conspired to murder Alile Soarez.’

It takes a lot of chaos and confusion and jinni dashing through the Observatory, but eventually, they all watch Sirr on a large athar screen. The circle and the square are there, in the dance of the nodes, in the flow of sobors and Seals, the whole economy of the city telling a children’s tale for those with the eyes to see.

Idris Soarez exhales.

‘The amount of capital needed to do this – it’s staggering. Embedding a body thief’s story in the financial system of the city, to be seen by only one muhtasib in a single sector – madness.’

‘Effective madness,’ Duny says. ‘Everything my sister says is true. The foundation our city is built upon is crumbling. The age of gogol trade is over.’

‘I still think there is room to discuss this openly with Sobornost,’ Lucius Aguilar says. ‘Get them to admit that they have openly dealt with and corrupted a muhtasib, that—’

‘What Councilman Aguilar does not appreciate is that we have not really been dealing with
Sobornost
,’ Duny says. ‘We are dealing with an eccentric aunt in the Sobornost family. The full might of Sobornost turned against us will mean our end, and when they come, it will be over in hours, if not in minutes.’

‘The first and only thing we have to do is to stop Abu Nuwas from getting to that jannah,’ Tawaddud says. ‘He has a mercenary army in the desert, on its way there.’

Mr Sen’s thought-form, a flame-bird, wavers. ‘It does look like the Nuwas family has spent great amounts of sobors essentially hiring all the mercenaries they could get their hands on. It is not possible to mobilise a similar force at such short notice.’

Visions of what the Axolotl showed her in the Palace of Stories flash in Tawaddud’s mind. Rivers of thought, castles made of stories. The eyes of a girl in a dirty dress, burning like embers.

‘Sirr does not need an army,’ Tawaddud says, turning to her father. ‘We have the desert. Father, it is time to speak to the Aun.’

26

MIELI AND THE LOST JANNAH

A part of Mieli watches Abu Nuwas stand in the prow of
Nakir
and speak strange words. Below, the wildcode desert smiles and moves in response. It reminds her of the Lakshmi plain on Venus, huge things moving beneath Earth’s crust.

‘My lords,’ Nuwas says, ‘ladies. I give you the Lost Jannah of the Cannon.’

But another part of her is in the pellegrini’s temple.

‘Mieli,’ says the goddess, smiling. There are stars in her auburn hair. ‘It looks like you have failed in yet another task.’

‘I have not failed yet,’ Mieli says. ‘It is just that I need to become something else to accomplish it.’

‘And what is that?’

‘An army,’ Mieli says.

In the other place, outside her head, a city is rising from the dust. A storm boils beneath the mercenary fleet. The wildcode desert recognises the Secret Name Abu Nuwas has spoken. Blue-tinted towers, palisades and walls rise from the spiral of white chaos. A hot wind comes, waste heat vented by the desert nanomachines. It makes the air boil and twist. The rukh ships struggle to stay still. Muhtasibs strain their wills to control the chimera creatures. Below, streets and buildings appear, angular letters written by a vast pen.

In a temple, far away, a goddess starts laughing.

‘What are you asking, little one? How would I even grant your request?’

‘I know you have inserted yourself into the Gourd systems. All that hardware above Earth. Use it.’

‘And reveal myself to the hsien-kus?’

‘The hsien-kus and vasilevs are going to come after you anyway. If they get the chen gogol, they are going to blackmail your lord and master to stay out of their way.’

‘An interesting theory,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Of course, it has one flaw: no one blackmails Matjek Chen.’ She touches her lips, suddenly. ‘Although. . . you have just given me an idea.’

She turns to the singularity of her temple. ‘Perhaps it
is
time for me to move more directly against those who would destroy me.’

Mieli bows her head.

‘You do understand that our technology will not survive in Earth’s atmosphere for long? That you are condemning those other selves of yours into a painful death?’

‘I am not afraid of death,’ Mieli says. ‘So none of us will be.’

‘Very well,’ the pellegrini says. ‘I am pleased. Perhaps you are growing up after all.’

She touches Mieli’s cheek. The goddess’ ring is cold against her scar. ‘It is only now that I’m taking your gogol,’ the pellegrini says. ‘No matter what Jean might tell you, I am not cruel. And you do remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.’

Then she is gone and Mieli is back on the bridge of
Nakir
, watching the Lost Jannah of the Cannon below.

Mieli steps forward and places a q-dot blade across Abu Nuwas’s throat.

‘I claim this jannah in the name of Joséphine Pellegrini of the Sobornost,’ she says.

Abu Nuwas stares at her with his one human eye.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asks.

‘I am Mieli. The daughter of Karhu of Hiljainen Koto, the beloved of Sydän of Kirkkaat Kutojat.’ She points at the sky with her free hand. Up in the dark blue of evening, between the arcs of Gourd, there is a cloud that flashes golden in the sunset light. ‘And so are they.’

There are machines within the Gourd, built over decades by the hsien-ku, gogol factories and smartmatter moulds and picotech fabbers. The pellegrini tells them to make angels.

The metacortex in Mieli’s brain lights up, becomes more than just a layer on top of her frontal lobe, a metaself. She feels the echoes of her other selves, moving with a unified purpose, a goal, exchanging rapid bursts to synchronise differences between mind-states, spreading their wings and diving towards Earth.

They enter the atmosphere in their thousands, smartmatter armour flaming in the re-entry. Already, they feel the kiss of wildcode that brings death, but that is what they are here to embrace.

They sing songs of Oort as a choir as they fall.

Mieli’s viewpoint on the bridge of
Nakir
shatters into a kaleidoscope. The words of Oort arrive before her other selves do, by a fraction of a second, a thunderous roar from a thousand throats.

The fractal angel storm cuts through the mercenary fleet like a blade. Rukh swarms evaporate before synchronised cannon fire.
Munkar
veers to one side.

‘This is a place of the Aun,’ Abu Nuwas shouts as the ship sways. ‘Your machines will be eaten. Without the Secret Name, they will never let you in.’

‘I told you my name,’ Mieli says. ‘That had better be good enough for them.’

She pushes the muhtasib aside and dives towards the jannah, joining the battle song. The wildcode desert rises to meet them.

They fight their way through the desert city. They take out wild jinni with codeweapons, destroy chimera beings with plasma and fire. The jannah itself turns against them. A tower becomes a nightmare worm. A mieli takes it out by detonating her fusion reactor in its mouth. The combined force of their wings creates a pillar of dust that hides the mercenary fleet above.

The deaths of her other selves are hammer blows in Mieli’s mind. The hot twisting burn of the wildcode. The tearing claws of chimera beasts. The pure white of a fusion explosion. The quick sharp self-destruct that some choose, before the wildcode turns them against their sisters. Mieli is there through every last moment, every final darkness, and there is a strange joy in each one, a purity that makes her feel like a brass bell, ringing.

This is what I was made for. This is what I am
.

In the end, the Lost Jannah of the Cannon is silent, full of fallen angels and shattered sapphire and dead towers like broken teeth. A domed building in the centre remains, a beautiful structure with an arced entranceway.

Remind me to never make you angry again
, the thief says in Mieli’s head.

‘Get ready,’ she says. ‘You are going to have your prince soon.’

Flanked by her other selves, Mieli enters the building.

There is a metal disc on the floor beneath the dome, ten metres in diameter. There are three figures waiting for her in front of it. There is a man in green, a strange glowing creature that looks like an octopus made of light, constantly shifting shape – and a little girl in a sooty dress and a wooden mask.

‘You have come for Father,’ the little girl says. ‘Our brother told us about you.’

Mieli blinks. The figures do not show up in spimescape, but they appear fully real. She can see the grains of the wood and the flaking paint in the girl’s mask.

‘
Perhonen
, are you getting this?’ Mieli whispers.

As far as I can tell, you are alone down there. Except for all the other Mielis, of course. The pellegrini has access to all the Gourd ghost imagers now. The jannah is directly below you, at the bottom of a long drop through a salt rock layer, almost a kilometre deep. There is a really big chamber down there, and lots of other stuff – geothermal power sources. Lots of chemicals, boron and hydrogen and radioactives
. A layered representation of the underground facility flickers in Mieli’s field of vision as the ship speaks.

‘Are you going to try to stop me?’ Mieli tells the desert ghosts. ‘It’s not going to go well for you.’ She still has almost a hundred remaining selves – battered, wildcode-ridden, armed only with makeshift weapons and flickering, failing q-blades – but they are all battle-ready.

‘We should ask you for a true story,’ the girl says. ‘But we already know yours.’

Then the three are gone, leaving Mieli with a strange, yearning feeling. She shakes her head.

‘Let’s get this over with,’ she says.

With the help of her other selves, she cuts away the metal, revealing a cylindrical shaft. She descends slowly on her wings, lighting up her armour to illuminate the passage.

It is hot at the bottom. There is a round chamber with a ledge around its base, hardened terminals in the walls, ancient touchscreens and ports for jacks that haven’t existed for centuries. Mieli lets her software gogols loose on them, pushes q-dot tendrils into the guts of the ancient machines.

Then she is inside the jannah’s vir, and everything is bright.

Mieli is standing on a beach.

It is not exactly like the hard physics-based virs that the Sobornost use, but something softer, more dream-like. Mieli stops to look at the sea: she has never seen one like it. The blue expanse seems endless, and her gaze gets lost in it for a moment. Its soft crashing on the sand feels soothing after the madness of battle.