The Fractal Prince

‘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.

The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon

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.

And then the Aun came to him in their glory. The Chimney Princess. The Kraken of Light. The Green Soldier. The Flower Prince.

Tell us a true story or we will take your life, they said.

But the boy only knew one true story.

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—

Tawaddud looks away. How did the ancients deal with this? Ghosts in their heads, made by others, everywhere they looked, ready to possess them and to do their bidding. But in Sirr, the ghosts are real, and they hide themselves in stories.

‘I think I know this one,’ Tawaddud says. She puts on her glasses, summons her athar vision again, speaks the words the Axolotl taught her. And there, two entwined loops in the girl’s head, clearly visible.

‘Ahmad,’ she says harshly, looking at the girl. ‘Ahmad the Sickness.’ A filament of neurons lights up in the girl’s brain. Got you.

‘Ahmad, I know it’s you. Do you know who I am?’

The girl snickers, suddenly, an odd, high-pitched sound. ‘Oh yes, baby, I know you, the Axolotl’s whore, long time, no see,’ she says, in a hissing voice.

Next to her, Abu Nuwas draws a sharp breath. Damn it. Not now. So much for the plan at getting back at Duny, so much for seduction. Tawaddud shakes her head and bites down on the disappointment. Muhtasib plots or not, she has a patient to treat.

‘So you know what I can do?’ She lowers her voice. ‘I know Secret Names that will root you out. If I speak them, they will find you and eat you. Is that what you want?’

‘Mahmud, what is she saying?’ says the girl, suddenly. ‘Where am I? Don’t let her hurt me.’

The acrobat takes a step forward, but Tawaddud holds up one hand. ‘Don’t listen to her, it’s a trick.’ She looks into the girl’s eyes. ‘Go away, Ahmad. Let this girl’s self-loop swallow you. Go back to the City, and I won’t tell the Repentants where your lair is. What do you say?’

The girl tears herself from the acrobat’s grip and leaps up. ‘Bitch! I will eat your—’

Tawaddud speaks the first syllables of the Thirty-Seventh Secret Name. The girl hesitates. Then she lays down on the mat on the floor. ‘You win,’ she says. ‘I’ll give your regards to the Axolotl. I hear he has a new squeeze.’

Then the girl goes limp, closes her eyes and starts breathing steadily. Tawaddud watches her brain for a few moments to make sure that the thing called Ahmad is letting its self – sneaked into the poor girl’s mind through words and athar – dissolve into nothingness. The girl’s eyes start fluttering behind closed eyelids.

‘She is going to sleep for a day or two,’ Tawaddud tells Mahmud the acrobat. ‘Surround her with familiar things. When she wakes up, she should be fine.’

She shoos away Mahmud’s excessive thanks, suddenly tired but triumphant. She looks at Abu and nods. See? That’s the other reason I come. She looks for signs of disgust or horror on the gogol merchant’s face, but sees only his brass eye, glittering with a strange hunger.

The patients finally thin out by nightfall. Abu Nuwas buys two shawarma wraps from a street vendor, and they eat together, sitting cross-legged on the inflatable mattress inside the tent. Outside are the noises of Banu Sasan, the constant rattle of the soul trains, flashes and booms of the Station, the chill of the Sobornost buildings