She brushes aside the old, habitual anger at the thought of his face, features that have become familiar over the last few months: bright eyes beneath heavy eyelids, an easy smile, high eyebrows as if sketched with a sharp pen. For a moment, she almost misses the biot link that her mistress used to bind them together, feeling what he feels. It made him easier to understand.
He made her sing, on Mars. Like everything he does, it was a trick, meant to cover up something he was doing behind her back. But through the biot link, she could feel his joy at her song. She had forgotten what it was like.
And there was honour. She could not abandon him to die in another prison, discarded by the pellegrini like a broken tool. How could she have done anything else? She touches the jewelled chain around her leg. Precious gems in a chain, one after another, irrevocable choices.
She lets go and continues to pray, slowly. The candlelight dances on the faces of the statues, and they start to become Sydan’s face, the wide mouth and high cheekbones, the arrogant pixie smile.
‘Why is it that you never pray to me, I wonder?’ the pellegrini says. ‘Gods are so old-fashioned. Memetic noise inside monkey heads. You should pray to me.’
The goddess stands in front of Mieli, a shadow framed by the zero-g candles, arms folded. As always, it is as if she is standing in normal gravity: her auburn hair is open and falls across shoulders left bare by a white summer dress.
‘I serve and obey,’ Mieli says. ‘But my prayers are my own.’
‘Whatever. I am generous. Prayers are overrated anyway.’ She waves a red-nailed hand. ‘You can keep them. I have your body, your loyalty and your mind. Remember what you promised me.’
Mieli bows her head. ‘I have not forgotten. What you ask is yours.’
‘Who is to say I haven’t already taken it?’
Mieli’s mouth goes dry, and there is a cold fist in her stomach. But the pellegrini laughs, a sound like tinkling of glass.
‘Not yet. Not yet.’ She sighs. ‘You are so amusing, my dear. But unfortunately, there is little time for amusement. I do, in fact, need your body, if not your soul. My Jean and I need to have a conversation. Circumstances have forced my other selves to set certain things in motion. Something is coming for you. You need to be ready.’
The pellegrini steps into Mieli’s body. It feels like plunging into freezing cold water. And then the cabin and the candlelight and the goddess are gone and Mieli is in the spimescape, a ghost among the tangled threads of the Highway.
2
TAWADDUD AND DUNYAZAD
Before Tawaddud makes love to Mr Sen the jinn, she feeds him grapes.
She takes one from the bowl in her lap, peels it carefully and holds it between her lips, kissing the sweet moist flesh. When she bites, there is a faint, metallic sigh from the jinn jar that is attached to the fine sensor net of the beemee in her hair by a thin white cable.
Tawaddud smiles and slowly eats another grape. She lets other sensations mingle with the taste this time. The feel of the silk of her robe on her skin. The luxurious weight of the mascara in her eyelashes. The jasmine scent of her perfume. Her former master Kafur taught her that embodiment is a fragile thing, made from the whispers and silences of the flesh.
She gets up, walks to the keyhole-shaped window with slow, careful steps. The delicate dance of the embodiment slave: moving so that the jinn bottle always stays out of sight. It took two hours to place the embroidered pillows and mirrors and low tables in the narrow room just right.
She allows the sun to warm her face for a moment and draws the soft curtains, and the light in the room takes on the hue of dark honey. Then she returns to her pillow seat at the round, low table in the centre of the room and opens the small jewelled casket that sits on top of it.
Inside, there is a book, hand-bound in cloth and leather. She takes it out slowly, to let Mr Sen enjoy the forbidden thrill that comes with it. The story within is a true story, of course, the only kind you are allowed to tell in Sirr. She knows it by heart but looks at the words anyway as she reads aloud, running her fingers along the rough texture of the paper before turning a page.
‘There was a young woman in Sirr,’ she begins, ‘not long after the coming of Sobornost and the Cry of Wrath, who was married to a treasure-hunter.’
Her father married her off when she was still very young. Her husband the mutalibun was old beyond his years. His first wife was possessed and went to the City of the Dead to live as a ghul. After that, he went on long journeys to dig up old heavens in the desert, to mine gogols for the Sobornost.
He bore the scars of his work: troubled wildcode dreams and sapphire growths that felt rough and sharp against her skin when they lay together. That was seldom: as mutalibun do, he had long since given up desire to survive in the desert, and touched her only because it was his duty as a husband. And so her days were lonely, in their fine house up on the Uzeda Shard.
One day, she decided to build a garden on the roof of their house. She hired Fast Ones to fly up loam from the greenhouses by the sea, planted seeds, told green jinni to make her seeds for flowers of all colours, and trees to provide shade. She worked hard for days and weeks, and asked her sister the muhtasib to protect the garden from wildcode with Seals. At night, she whispered to her garden, to make it grow: she had studied athar magic with jinn tutors in her father’s house, and knew many Secret Names.
The jinn-made seeds grew quickly, and when the little garden was in full bloom, she spent long evenings sitting there, enjoying the smell of the earth and the fragrance of the flowers and the sun on her skin.
One evening, a strong wind came from the desert. It blew over the Shard and through the garden. It brought a cloud of old nanites with it that settled in the garden like thick, heavy fog. The little machines condensed into glittering droplets on the leaves and petals of her flowers. They were as fresh and pure as some of the ancient utility foglets from the Sirr-in-the-Sky that her father kept in a bottle in his study.
The mutalibun’s wife started whispering and thinking at the fog, like she had been taught. She lay down on the soft grass and asked the fog to make the hands and lips of a lover.
The fog obeyed. It swirled around her and ran soft, cool fingers down her spine. It tickled her neck and collarbone with a tongue of mist.
Tawaddud pauses, slowly removes her robe and whispers to activate the mirrors she has carefully set around the room. Mr Sen used to be a man, and men need to see. In that way, her once-female clients are easier – but far more demanding in other ways, of course.
So she lies down on the pillows, looks at herself in the mirror, rolls her head so that her thick dark curls hide the beemee cable, and smiles. The amber light brings out her cheekbones and hides the fact that – so unlike Dunyazad’s – her mouth is slightly too large and her body not as slender as her sister’s. But her skin is as dark and smooth, and her muscles firm from the long climbs on the Shards.
Remembering the fog, running her fingertips across her breasts and down her belly, she continues.
‘But with the second kiss, and the third, she found that the fog was not just responding to her thoughts, was not just an extension of her own hands and lips, but a living thing from the desert, just as alone and hungry as she was. Fog-tendrils wove themselves into her hair playfully. As she reached for the fog, it made smooth, warm curves and planes for her to touch. Gently, it pushed her down to the grass—’
Her heartbeat quickens. This is how Mr Sen likes to finish. She touches herself harder, lets the book fall shut. As always, as the heat under her fingers builds up and her hips buck against her hand, shuddering with hot and cold earthquakes, she finds herself thinking of the Axolotl—
But before she can cross the edge and take Mr Sen with her, the visitor chime rings, the brass sound sharp and sudden.
