Jack Cloudie

they were sheltered by the palace’s crystal covering, shimmering as it matched opacity with the position of the sun burning high above the capital. Omar revelled in the expensive, luxurious sprays of water on his skin as he watched the calligraphy slowly tracking across the dome’s inner surface, an animated scroll from the writings of the Holy Cent. But the mournful retainer Omar was travelling with managed to spoil even the sight of this dazzling world when he pointed out that now, only the visions of the keepers of the Sect of Razat were present in the enchanted march of words, the teachings from the other ninety-nine sects’ temples relegated to the evening after the majority of the court had retired to bed for the night.

Omar looked at the courtiers walking around the cool waters, nodding respectfully at each other on their slow circuits of the landscaped paradise, and the knots of officials — some in uniforms, some in expensive silk robes — sprawled across the grass while tiny colourful birds fluttered in and out of the trees. This was the life, Omar decided. Being waited on by retainers with iced jugs of water under the magical shade of the palace’s domes. One day he and Shadisa would share it together, of that he was certain.

‘What do they find to talk about all day?’ Omar wondered out loud.

‘Who’s up, who’s down,’ said Boulous. ‘Who’s in and who’s out. Which sect of the Holy Cent is gathering the most worshippers and tithes, which sect is dwindling. Which viziers are to be replaced this year and who is to replace them. Which of our dominions will rebel and who the Caliph Eternal will trust to crush them. It is like a game of draughts with ten thousand players competing on a single board.’

‘I could play such a game,’ said Omar.

‘Yes, yes, but a better question is why would you want to?’ Boulous pointed to one of the retainers holding out a tray of delicate steaming kebabs for a small group of men wearing turbans. ‘Better to buy your food from a street vendor in the souks below the palace hills. Then at least you will know the true price you must pay up front.’

Why would I want to? So I can bring down the bastards that sacked Haffa and stole Shadisa from me. I can think of no finer game than that.

The two of them crossed the largest of the domes where the palace’s pavilions intertwined with numerous waterways, walking under an arched entrance and emerging into one of the adjoining rotunda. Omar noted that when seen from above, standing on the parapets of the guardsmen’s fortress, the palace domes’ crystal surface appeared to shimmer in a medley of colours, but from inside there was a uniform appearance of a slightly shaded sky — as if the roof hardly existed at all — and god himself was writing the words of the hundred sects’ holy teachings across the heavens.

As new to palace life as Omar was, it was easy enough to recognize the domain of the womb mages, the delicate sophistication of bulb-shaped pavilion towers and calligraphy-engraved marble walls giving way to a featureless ziggurat made out of a dull, brooding stone. The building was so out of place it looked as if a squadron of draks might have lifted it out one of the dark, distant provinces of the south and dropped it down onto the hills for the Caliph Eternal’s architects to raise a dome about its bulk. Unlike many of the palace’s grander buildings, there were none of the caliph’s soldiers standing sentry outside. For who in their right mind would want to disturb the peace of such men as dwelt inside the ziggurat? The main doorway at its foot was guarded only by the twin serpents from the garden of life, carved in stone above the entrance and intertwined in the shape of a helix, the womb mages’ ancient symbol, hung up outside their surgeries in bazaars. Unfortunately for Omar, the inhabitants of this building weren’t simple healers, able to encourage a fisherman’s finger to grow back after proving too careless with a scaling knife, available to craft a changeling virus to bless a soon-to-be-born child with extra height and strength. Here lurked the guardians of the caliph’s private library of spells; secrets that dated back to when Ben Issman, his name be blessed, had led his people into the desert and made life bloom there, rediscovering the one true god who had been lost for so long. Womb mages powerful and dark, trained in the heart of the sorcerer’s own city, Mutantarjinn, their dark domain scored out of the very rock by the sight of god when the highest of highests’ eyes reopened after sleeping for so long.

Even if the womb mages inside the ziggurat hadn’t embraced the troublesome new sect, Omar would have avoided them like the plague in the normal course of affairs. Avoided them in the same way people avoided an undertaker; because they touched dead flesh as well as living, and the things they did to slaves, especially women, did not bear thinking about. It was for good reason that when slaves were bred, the slaves themselves prayed for males and the masters — thinking about the resale value of their progeny — prayed for females.

Boulous placed his hand on a glass panel set in the wall and a light appeared as if a lantern had been lit behind the crystal; a short while later, a small iron sally door set within the larger gate opened. A eunuch wearing robes marked with the twin snake helix bade them enter, making a snide comment about having to open the gate to a mere jahani, a discourtesy which the retainer and Omar both chose to ignore. Inside, they were led through stone passages, corridors made an indeterminate size by an ethereal red illumination that revealed little.

‘It is dark inside your corridors,’ said Omar.

‘There are things grown here that would not benefit from brighter light,’ said the eunuch guiding them. ‘Does it scare you?’

‘Me? I am as brave as a sand lion. Besides, I prefer the darkness,’ said Omar. ‘In darkness all women look beautiful and even the stalest of bread appears a banquet.’

‘You will like it here then,’ muttered the eunuch.

They travelled further than the length of the ziggurat Omar had seen outside and he realized that they must now be travelling underground, the womb mages’ domain stretching to chambers and corridors carved out below the hill itself. Their passage intersected a far larger one and Omar tripped over the first of a pair of metal rails set in the floor when he made to cross the space. As Boulous extended a hand to help him up, the eunuch raised a palm to stop the two of them going any further. A rumbling grew louder in the half-light, a sled-like affair on rail-locked wheels being drawn down the passage by a team of twenty bare-chested slaves. The sled was mounted by a tall glass box, as if the slaves were pulling a giant aquarium behind them; a thick mustard-yellow gas swirled about inside.

Omar caught a glimpse of the glass case’s occupant as it passed and nearly stumbled again. It looked like a woman struggling underneath the crush of an albino whale, choking in the yellow stew. But as the mist momentarily cleared he saw it was the woman’s own body that curved out into a whale-sized appendage, her lower ribs as large as the archways around the palace pools and hung with rolls of flesh so gargantuan she looked as if she was drowning in her own frame.

Omar grasped the eunuch’s shoulder. ‘She’s suffocating inside there!’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the eunuch, disdainfully removing Omar’s hand. ‘The gas is a nutrient bath. No producer can eat enough through her mouth to feed both herself and her load. The skin of her womb must absorb the food directly. That producer’s load is a mine worm. Not quite as large as a drak when it’s born, but large enough to need a gallon of food pumped into the producer’s tank every hour during her second trimester. Ours is not an easy vocation, it requires both precision and dedication.’

Omar watched the sled disappear down the rails with horror, imagining his mother’s face swollen and red, as she choked on the mustard-coloured fumes of her food. ‘What will happen after the birth?’

‘The mine worm will be taken to the mountains at Riyjhi — the Caliph Eternal’s prospectors have discovered many new veins of silver there.’

‘No,’ said Omar, ‘to her.’

‘The producer will be normalized and rested for a month,’ said the eunuch as if he was talking to a child. ‘You can’t keep them breeding constantly. Not unless you want to receive a whipping for a miscarriage.’ He pointed to the disappearing sled. ‘Lose an expensive load like that and you would be made to feel it. Two thousand tughra. And it will cost the caliph as much as that to raise your drak; remember the cost next time you choose to dive around the sky as if you are flying a five-coin hawk bought for you at the bazaar by your mother.’

What if that’s been done to Shadisa, what if that’s the life the bandits sold her into?

‘Be careful what you say,’ Boulous warned the eunuch, ‘and who you say it to.’

‘I know who the House of Barir is,’ sneered the eunuch, looking at Omar, ‘or who it was. Old money. A manta ray with a modified spleen system and gills that filter salt. Not so difficult. The witches that walk the dunes with the nomads no doubt consider salt-fish quite a feat of sorcery out in the borderlands. Here in the Jahan we are not impressed with such petty trickery.’

Omar and Boulous followed the eunuch down a passage lined with mesh-gated doors, each giving onto a