The Fractal Prince

The Great Observatory sits on top of the Blue Shard, above its waterfalls and palaces and muhtasib buildings with their azure walls. It is a lenticular structure held aloft by arches that rise from the top of the Shard and bow towards the city. Tawaddud has never been there. The carpet guides Tawaddud, Duny and their Repentant guards to a modest entrance on the building’s upper surface.

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